Tips for leads
 

Does anyone have any really good documentation for learning to play leads, I have a lot of experience but i have mostly been playing acoustic guitar so im very rusty and want to get back into playing some electric. I know my major and minor scales as well as pentatonic. My style is more modern with some jazz influence but i was never a strong jazz player. I find some stuff online but i feel like it doesnt necessarily help with voicing and such. Also my fingers arent that fast either i play more clean than fast as my one guitar teacher told me thats more important than shredding.

HERE is a little paper I wrote on the art of soloing. In it I look at the solo from the standpoint of a composer and think of it as a composition.


Bob

You could try scat-singing a "guitar solo" into a recorder, and then learning to play what you sang.

Bob's article has this interesting bit - "I’ve also found that some songs seem to cry out for pre-arranged leads, while others demand raw improvisation. For example, the blues demand the latter: I find it uncomfortable to do pure blues without freshly improvising the solos."

Here's a blues -- well, a caucasian, suburban, Presbyterian attempt at a blues -- where I did the "raw improvisation" by singing the thing, and then sat down and learned to play it. In Edison terms, 20 seconds of inspiration followed by 20 minutes of perspiration. But then again, Bob's a very good player while I'm more of an... "editor."

The solo's at around 1:40.

Excellent !!

Julian Lage recommends an exercise in which you choose a note near the nut, then another high up (or the other way around); repeat, adding an extra note somewhere in between every repetition or two, and try to keep it melodic.

Practicing with a looper pedal is also good. Not just noodling over a chord progression, but layering simple loops and trying to keep it going as long as you can.