Learning to play lead

[niumaiat]

I'm a new comer to this forum and I've been impressed by what I have read so far. I have a nagging need to play basic lead to start off with since I've gone far enough with learning chords and playing songs.

I'd like to know is what people did, that is the steps they took, to transition from being just chord players to play a bit of 'picking'. I'm using the word 'picking' in the generic sense; what I mean may be called soloing or improvising or playing the melody or whatever.

I'd appreciate any advice on what I should do because I feel I'm going around in circles. I'm self-taught and it's probably the reason I'm going around the bend!

Niumaia

[stanron]

Originally Posted by niumaiat

I'm a new comer to this forum and I've been impressed by what I have read so far. I have a nagging need to play basic lead to start off with since I've gone far enough with learning chords and playing songs.

I'd like to know is what people did, that is the steps they took, to transition from being just chord players to play a bit of 'picking'. I'm using the word 'picking' in the generic sense; what I mean may be called soloing or improvising or playing the melody or whatever.

I'd appreciate any advice on what I should do because I feel I'm going around in circles. I'm self-taught and it's probably the reason I'm going around the bend!

Niumaia

Pick a simple tune, one you know the chords to and you know, in your head, the tune. Play the first chord and try to find the melody in and around the notes of the chord.

Some of the notes will be in the chord and others will be one or two frets away from a chord note.

G is a good key to try this in to start with. Treat it as an exploration rather than actually trying to play the tune first time off.

When the chord changes try to do the same with the new chord.

Good luck.

[JonPR]

I agree with stan: learn to play melodies. Vocal tunes, instrumental tunes, anything.
Lead improvisation is (almost) always about trying to construct new melodies on top of existing chord changes. The written melody of any song is the best example of how that works.
It's never the only way a melody can run through the chords, it's just the way the composer chose. Your job is to find other routes, but the melody gives you invaluable tips - not just in how a tune fits its chords, but in how it's phrased.

As for what I did... One reason I started learning guitar was because I couldn't sing, but still wanted to make music. So the first thing I did, before learning chords, was to learn to play simple melodies - to sing with my guitar, as it were. It started with blues riffs (Smokestack Lightnin' etc), and old Shadows tunes, and I composed my own tunes as soon as I had a guitar - more interested in melody and rhythm than the chords.
When I learned songs, I'd always learn the tune first, then work out the chords if I could (which was harder).
What this meant, down the line, was that I had no trouble improvising lead solos. It was obvious what had to be done, no one needed to teach me. Even when it got to quite complex jazz, the chords were fancier but the principle was the same - make a new tune. (And you make the tune, obviously, out of the notes in the chords.)

I didn't plan that course of action - nobody told me playing melodies was a good idea. But the point is, it worked.

[Bikewer]

I started out from a Guitar Player article on the basic pentatonic scale shapes. As I recall, they had 5 of them... Think of them as patterns. You can move these all over the neck.

If you take a simple tune, llike a blues in E, you can play entire lead lines by using the E pentatonic patterns. You can get more complicated, of course, by playing the appropriate pentatonic scale for each chord change... the A and the B as well as the E...

And you can get really fancy by throwing in the relative minor for the key of E. That's an easy way to get going and the pentatonic scales are applicable to a wide variety of music... Not just the blues.
It's mostly having a decent ear and playing notes that sound good in the context of the song. When in doubt... Go back to the melody.....

[pf400]

Welcome to the forum...did you make up that name ?

My breakthrough was from a book I bought decades ago, that included a record. It taught me what it called "rock clichés", or licks that fit within the pentatonic scale. Following the blues and rock backing track, I inserted those licks wherever it felt right, making sure the timing was right. I use this as my way of teaching lead guitar and if you are in my area I could meet you and show you what I mean, for a cup of coffee at Tim's first. Actually I highly recommend that you take a lesson or two on this...will get you going and save you tons of time. .really fun too.

[H165]

There are dozens of standard "runs" which fit into the various scales. They can be the building blocks of getting muscle-memory to do the basic work for you.

There are some players who can close their eyes and "feel" where every note is on a specific guitar (many fiddle player do this routinely). I'll probably never achieve that, but it's a good goal to assist in improvisation.

[Bob Womack]

How about some info about the mindset and approach behind a solo? Look HERE for more.

Bob

[Riverwolf]

Welcome to the forum.
I have attempted to ask this question several different ways myself.
I follow your thread with great interest.

[jseth]

Welcome to the Forum!

GREAT question, and one that can be answered a number of ways...

Now, I can tell you how I started and progressed (quite slowly, I must say), OR, I can tell you "how I would do it now"... vastly different approaches to the same endeavor!

The way I started (back in the early 60's!), was by watching other players, friends mostly, and having them show me one or two "licks" to practice... then, I would practice them until I had them settled in, and then I would go back and get something else to work on... along the way, I began to learn/pick-out the signature lead lines of my favorite songs of the day... being raised in Southern California, I'd venture to say that the first song I learned would be "Miserlou", by Dick Dale and the Deltones...

But I actually began my guitar playing by picking out the melody to "Tom Dooley", a popular folk song by the Kingston Trio in the late 50's... I learned the melody on just the lower (bass) strings... and I was quite pleased with myself to do that!

It wasn't until the mid-70's when I was in a band with a (then) recent graduate from Berklee School of Music, that I truly learned to play solo and improvise... along with playing scales to a metronome (major, pentatonic, chromatic, arpeggios, 1/2 tone whole tone scales, diminished arpeggios and all that) at a VERY SLOW setting (1/4 note = 42 bpm), I also received an intense tutoring in modern diatonic chord theory and harmony. The main portion of this "tutoring" only lasted a year or so, but I've been developing what I learned over the past 4 decades now... LOTS to digest!

Working with a metronome and playing scales helped immensely to develop a feel for rhythms and to familiarize my fingers/hands with different patterns on the fretboard...

Of course, NO ONE wants to hear someone "play scales", so very quickly I had to "unlearn" a lot of that, and learn to use my "inner voice" to guide my playing... and one of the interesting things that you learn from doing a lot of work with theory and harmony is... ANYTHING GOES!

I'm serious here... you can play anything over or against anything else, but the caveat is: YOU HAVE TO ABSOLUTELY MEAN WHAT YOU PLAY... without that sort of "deliberate intent", you're just 'stringing spaghetti", doing some form of masturbation with scales and licks and blah,blah,blah...

For me, soloing or improvising on a piece of music is really a matter of feeling that piece of music and what's needed or wanted with regards to that feeling, then listening to my "inner voice" and trusting that, following that.

There are certainly a lot of "lead" guitarists who simply regurgitate licks and ideas they've gleaned from other players, but that's hardly improvising, in my book...

A whole lot depends upon what YOU want to do with playing solo lines or improvising...

[posternutbag]

I am mostly a mandolin player, but I believe that the way I approach playing lead is pretty much universal to any instrument. It incorporates many ideas from the "Flatpicking Essentials" series, particularly books 1-3.

To my mind, there are two ways to approach lead, and the best lead players use both ideas. One can either embellish an existing melody or create an altogether new melody. Inside a given solo you can actually do both. But, IMO, you have to be able to play the melody before you can do either, otherwise you are really just running scales and your leads will sound disorganized and happenstance.

So the very first thing I do when learning a new tune is I learn to play a dead simple version of the melody. Some people will figure out the chord progression and then use that to learn the melody; that works too, but I find it easier to extract chords from a melody, rather than a melody from chords.

Once I learn the melody, I play it over and over again until I am literally burned out on the tune. I might learn the tune in a couple of keys, or at least in 2 different positions on the fretboard. As a guitarist, this is much easier because you have a lot more fretboard to use.

Once I know the melody by heart, I look to embellish it. I find the long notes in the tune, whether that is quarter notes, half notes, or whole notes. Once I find long notes, I figure out how much space I have to embellish. If a tune is mostly eighth notes with some quarter notes, I know that those quarter notes give me two beats for my embellishment. if the long tone is a half note, then I have 4 beats to work with. I think of it as breaking up the long tones into short tones.

So, lets say a melody is moving along in eighth notes and then at the end of the phase we have a quarter note. I take that quarter note and turn it into two eighths maybe playing a note above or below.

This to me, is where the "art" comes in. Up till now I have approached improvisation more like algebra than music, but playing around with the space you have created and figuring out what sort of notes sound good is what separates good lead players from boring lead players. This just takes time and experimentation, although the more theory you know, the easier it is to know what will sound "right."

To me, Art Tatum, the great jazz pianist, was a master at embellishing a melody. He would play the melody, but when he got to the longer tones, instead of a single note he would play these incredible arpeggios and long melodic runs, turning a half note into 8 sixteenth notes.

This is a good example of Tatum taking a familiar tune and then embellishing it to within an inch of its life:



As Tatum plays, sing along in your head. When he gets to a longer note, he throws in these incredible arpeggios and chromatic runs. That is embellishment at its finest.

Once you can embellish a melody by filling in the spaces, you can begin to rework the melody entirely, or in parts. I tend to state a couple of bars of the melody and then go off on my own. I track the changes in my head and use arpeggios and scales to rework or perhaps even re-write the tune. The chords stay the same, but the tune is entirely my own.

The highest form of lead playing is doing all of this, quoting important snippets of the melody, embellishing parts of it and re-working/rewriting other parts.

This is probably my favorite reworking of a tune, Coltrane quotes parts of the melody so that the listener knows what tune he is playing, but he also uses a substantial amount of embellishment, and then there are points where he completely changes the melody over the existing changes.

[rick-slo]

Most out of the box improvised stuff leaves me cold. Usually there is little in the way of extended phrasing and satisfying use of tension and release. It may be fun for the player, but less so for the listener.

I do like the idea, already expressed by others, of taking the music's existing melody line and expanding on it, rather than abandoning it and just running through your personal inventory of scales.


For short stretches you can get away with ad lib, whatever, but over longer periods you should stick more closely to the song or at least have more planned out.


As far as branching away from just chords, you could take the song's chords and try arpeggios within them instead of block note playing. Then you could take your ideas from that and extend the note sequence to different positions up or down the fretboard thus getting more into the pure scale territory. Your are still not likely thinking about what you are doing theory wise, but are going by ear and gliding along within the structure of the song.