Lead Guitar Tips To Help Improve Your Playing

The most important part of my lead guitar sound comes from my fingers, and more specifically from the way in which I hold the plectrum.

Some guitarists hold the plectrum too far away from their fingers. What I mean by that is they have too much of the plectrum sticking out past their fingers. When I used to gig 5 to 6 nights a week, I had a permanent S worn into the nail of my index finger. The reason for that was because I only let a small part of the plectrum protrude beyond my thumb and first finger.

What happens when you do this is that by tilting your hand slightly forward, your nail hits the string a split second before your plectrum does. This alters the tone and gives it a lot more harmonic content.

There have been times when another guitarist would come up to do a guest spot, and sound totally different.

I remember at one time thinking “Hey, my guitar rig sounds a lot better than that”. Just hitting a string with a plectrum gives a very mediocre sound. Distorted guitar has a lot of potential to really bring out the harmonic content in your guitar sound. When you hold the plectrum really deep inside your fingers, it makes it so much easier during a lead guitar solo to pick excellent harmonics without putting too much thought into it.

A lead guitar tip to improve your picking speed

The first thing to remember is to pick up and down, not just down like some people just starting out are quite likely to do. What I’m talking about is going down up down up, or vice versa. A long time ago, I was eager to improve my picking speed, so I developed a small scale pattern to practice on that didn’t require too much movement of my fretting hand. Here is the pattern I used, you can start this in any position on the fretboard.

Let’s start this at the fifth fret. I will give you the string number, and then the frets to press.
6th string (the thickest one) – fret 5, 7 and 8
5th string – fret 5, 6 and 7
4th string – fret 5, 6 and 7
3rd string – fret 5, 6 and 7
2nd string – fret 5, 7 and 8
1st string – fret 5, 7 and 8

Start off slowly with this one and gradually speed up using the alternate picking and go back and forth, so when you get to the 8th fret on the first string then do descending run as well.

It’s important to remember that one picks up speed picking by using your wrist rather than wriggling your fingers back and forth. Eddie Van Halen calls this Fan picking.

Some people might want to use a metronome, but it’s not entirely essential.

When you’ve got your picking speed up, then you can look into worrying about the left hand notes, although this pattern fits quite well into the major scale at higher speeds. Have fun (very important)

By: Andrew Gavin Webber

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