How To Get Better At Lead Guitar

In this lead guitar lesson, we're going to take a look at one of the best ways to get better at the guitar - applying what you learn to music. Applying everything you learn to music is a surefire way to both accelerate your progress and have fun actually playing real music. We'll be focusing on how we can use a few scales and arpeggio shapes to play along to this jam track in the style of Eric Gales.

If you don't know the minor pentatonic scale already, you'll want to check out this lesson: The Minor Pentatonic Scale

The chords in this tune can make it a little confusing. While the tonal center of the song is D, and the D minor pentatonic scale fits very well over top of it, there is a G major chord in the B section. Because of this, the song is actually in D Dorian. So we have the freedom to also incorporate the D Dorian scale to add a little more flavor when improvising.

Scale Shapes

There are three main scales that you can use with this jam track. The D minor pentatonic scale is a good one to start with. As you get more comfortable with the jam track or you're a more advanced player, you can work on incorporating the D blues scale and the D Dorian scale as well.

Chord Tones

When you're ready to focus more on picking specific notes to play when improvising, a great way to start is by emphasizing the chord tones of the chords you're playing over. In this case, we can emphasize the notes of a D minor or D minor 7 chord. These notes will tend to sound best over a D minor chord.

Add this jam track to your daily practice routine, and experiment with using these scales and arpeggios. Musical application is the best way to accelerate your progress on the guitar is a great way to have more fun in your practice time!

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