Rock Lead 00 - Introduction

Hi guys, and thank you for joining me in this lead guitar course. Now here I am gonna be showing you all the essential lead guitar techniques to get you playing real rock guitar, lead lines and solos as soon as possible and showing you all the essentials. By the end of this course, you will have the lead guitar skills and knowledge to be able to improvise over the backing tracks. Which are included in this course and also be able to go on to improvise over any piece of rock music that you're into. Now everything that we're looking at in this course is going to be based upon the minor pentatonic scale. And we're going to be touching on a little bit of the Dorian mode and a little bit of other notes that we can use uh along with this. But we're gonna be using that minor pentatonic as the framework of this entire course, and it is easily the most common guitar scale used for rock lead guitar and riffs. But I want to briefly cover in this introduction exactly why that is the case, so that you know where you can improvise using the licks and lead guitar styles that you learn in this course. So it is the major scale that is the foundation of all Western music. But the minor pentatonic is how we play lead guitar solos. And there's good reason for this. The minor pentatonic is a 5 note scale. And if we use the A minor pentatonic as our example, the notes in this scale, the letter names of these notes are A, C, D. and G. And from there, those notes just repeat. A. E, G, and so on and so forth. There are no other letter names of any notes no matter where you play this scale on the neck. Now in rock music and rock riffs, what happens is we can turn those single notes into chords, either power chords or even major chords. Either work absolutely fine. And if I just play every one of those same notes. That I've just listed on the thickest string. We'd be playing them at the 5th fret, the 8th fret. 10th 12th And 15th. And those notes again are the A, note, the C. D. E I G. What we do in rock music is we, as I say, we can turn each one of those notes from the scale into a power chord or a major chord. So I can play every one of these notes. And play the power chord associated with it, so A note, A power chord, C note, C power chord. D note at 10th fret, D power chord. Enote at 12th fret. E Power cord, and finally, G note at 15 fret. G power cord or a G5. Now it doesn't have to even be in those positions, it can be any way that we can play these chords, and commonly rock songs such as Highway to Hell, uh Rock and Roll Train by AC DC. And many others. The standard open courts. And G With the minor pentatonic scale notes going over them for any uh brief bits of lead improvisation or full solos, or even just embellishments to the riff. And that works from essentially a music theory point of view, because the notes are saying the same thing as the chord. The same notes we're using in our solos are the root notes of the chords that we're using in the song. And when that is the case, you know that it's fine to use anything that you learn in this course, um, over, over that piece of music. When we're in the key of A, it would be using those chords A, C, D, E, and G. Other chords could happen in the song, but those chords are definitely making up the bulk of your song, and you know it's good to uh improvise over it. The safest place to begin trying to improvise is over the backing tracks that are provided in this course. However, most of those backing tracks are in A, but some of them do change key. So how can we go about doing that? Well, as I say, everything that we're going to learn in this course is going to be in the key of A, based on the A minor pentatonic scale. Between 5th fret and 8th fret, and starting at 5th fret on the thickest Estring. That note is an A. So whatever key your song happens to be in, say it's in the key of B, we just start from the B note which is at 7th fret, and then we just play. We just learn where we are in, in the position wise, and any string bending or any licks that we learn. Um, anything like that, we just learn it proportionate to that 7 fret note or whatever your key happens to be. So really to be able to solo in any key using everything that we learn in this course, you just need to know all the notes on your thickest Estring, and uh they start from the open E of course. You only need to memorise them really up to a 12 fret, but you could go on to to learn them after that cause they just repeat. But we would have E to F. We then have an F and we then have a G. G and then from 5th fret, it's back to A again cos that's the fifth fret that we use to begin this. A, A, B. There is no B so it goes on to C, C, D. D and E, and again it would just repeat from there. It is far easier, rather than just memorising that as a full order to spot the pattern. And we're gonna be looking a lot at patterns in this course. If you can get around to this spotting a pattern way of thinking and playing, uh, everything gets a whole lot easier, especially to change key. So the best pattern that I can give you is the first three dots on your guitar, G, A and B. At the 3rd, 5th, and 7th frets. Uh, between those you would have either G or A flat from, you know, knowing basic music theory from my beginner's course, I believe this is at level 5 that I that I cover this. And you need to remember that there is no sharp or flat between E and F or between the B and C. And other than that, you should be able to have those marker points, the 3rd, 5th and 7th frets. And also the 12th fret, the, the double dot on our guitar, is an E note, that's where our guitar repeats after this. And with that knowledge, um, you should be able to move everything that we learn, say if you learn a lick, uh, which involves string bending. Which uses the A minor pentatonic scale, or notes from it. We should be able to move that up to say 12 frets. And be able to do it there. If you can't do that straight away, don't panic. But once you're used to uh the pattern studies and the licks and techniques that we learned throughout this course, you can come back to this video with that extra knowledge and really. Learn how to apply it uh straight away over the backing tracks that are included in this course, and there will be further support for you doing that on the website. But let's get straight into lesson one now and uh start learning how to play League guitar solos.