If you’re just learning guitar, getting started with playing solos might seem daunting. It’s a big change to go from strumming chords to your favorite songs, to playing lead lines. The best thing is to start out easy, but not too easy. The more you challenge yourself, the better a guitarist you’ll become. Just remember to take everything in bite size chunks as you’re learning. To help you get started with solos, I’m recommending a couple that I’d learn if I was just getting started - one from three different genres. The feeling of learning and playing lead is amazing. Let’s get into it.
I’ve observed hundreds of guitarists over the years from all different skill levels, and the ones who are making a lot of progress often share a lot of the same traits - they have a plan when they sit down to practice, they know the people to go to when they’re facing a hurdle in their playing, and they’re endlessly curious about guitar and music in general.
But outside of all of that, there’s one habit I’ve seen that all of my favorite guitarists have - they practice active listening.
Hiya! Every Sunday I put out a brand new issue of Six String Sunday. It's a weekly newsletter that collects what's going on with the site, plus my favorite guitar stuff I found from around the internet. Below is a copy of July 2nd's 6SS. If you want to get the best guitar stuff in your inbox once a week, sign up and join our community.
String skipping can turn run of the mill riffs into really exciting ones. The technique also helps you break out of the box of playing scales up and down the fretboard. Practicing string skipping in your warm up can help you be more accurate as your practice session goes on. Today I want to show you how to improve your string skipping by using a familiar set of patterns that you may already know.
Getting lost on the fretboard is one of the most discouraging things while playing. Today we're going to learn a bunch of different examples to help you never get lost on the fretboard again! All the examples use the octave method to find your way around the fretboard, whether that be high up on the guitar neck or down low.
