Lead Guitar Drills

While lead guitar isn’t necessarily more difficult than rhythm guitar, it does usually take substantially longer to develop the speed and muscle control to play those types of parts. Taking the time to drill the mechanics over and over again will end up resulting in a much faster rate of progress than just trying to learn songs. They might not necessarily be exciting or interesting, but if you put the time into developing your mechanical skills, you will find that learning new riffs and solos will take a lot less time.

One important thing to keep in mind is to use a metronome when practicing these, and make sure you are playing these perfectly in time. It is far better to play an exercise at 60 BPM and gradually work your way up rather than starting at 150 BPM and trying to clean up your playing. Working at tempos just above your best speed can be helpful, but if you go too high, you will get virtually nothing from it. It is better to start conservatively until you are better aware of your limits.

The following exercises are played one finger per fret. While they may look quite similar, notice the difference in the actual mechanics being used in each one. Not only is it important to play the right note at the right time, but you also need to use the right dynamics as well.

This exercise is fairly straight forward playing with straight sixteenth notes and an accented note on each down beat. You should strike the accented notes harder than the normal notes, but not so hard that you are banging the string into the frets. You should be able to exactly hear where the downbeat is in your playing. Also be sure the shift is seamless as you change positions. This pattern should be continued further up the neck, but it repeats in this fashion all the way up the neck.

The next exercise should likewise have a very distinct downbeat, but this time it is achieved by palm muting the non-downbeat notes rather than by accenting the downbeat. In this fashion, they actually work somewhat like ghost notes (the opposite of an accent note, instead of playing the note louder than normal, it is played softer), which are actually not too commonly used among guitarists in the traditional sense of the term.

This next drill is again the same pattern, but this time it uses hammer-ons and pull-offs to play each series of notes. This can be a frustrating drill to do if you aren’t too experienced with both techniques using all your fingers, but it is a very good way to build up your abilities with all four of your fingers.

Once you have the articulation for these exercises down, the next step is to go back and work on all the various permutations. For example, instead of 1-2-3-4, play each one 1-2-4-3, 1-3-2-4, 1-3-4-2, 1-4-2-3, 1-4-3-2, 2-1-3-4, etc. This will help to get used to being able to switch between every finger. The third exercise will likely give you trouble with certain permutations, but if you stick with it, you will reach a point where no hammer-on or pull-off line should give you a problem. Just be sure to take each one slow and let your skills develop on their own accord.

It is very important to play these exercises clean and in rhythm, as opposed to simply fast. There are a huge number of guitarists that can cram a large number of notes into a second, but there are far, far fewer that can properly play articulation in rhythm. A lot of very impressive solos really aren’t all that fast, but the range of techniques and quality of playing are what make those parts really stand out.

Keep on rockin'!