Get started playing lead guitar with these 2 easy square shapes. Not sure where to start? Start here

all right so last week i created a video in the middle of the week a little motivational video and i called it how to do a lot with a little or how to say a lot with a little and the point of that was to create a video that lets you know that you don't have to know everything about theory before you can start playing music i see a lot of people that feel like they need to know it all and that all the background information before they can start having fun with it and that's just not the case in fact you're better off to take the little information that you do know even if it's just a quarter or two and start really beating it up like looking at it and wrestling with it and trying to really understand it you know and so i gave a couple of examples of how to play chord in different spots and then i showed you how to take two notes and then play a very simple lead from that but i had a lot of people asking if i could create a follow-up video and so this video is a follow-up to what i talked about last week uh you don't have to see that you can start here but if if you're new to playing lead maybe you've never played lead or maybe you don't even know how to start playing lead that's a very easy scenario to fall into because there's so much information how do you start this thing this is a great lesson for that because we're going to take a very simple shape a simple square and i'm going to show you how to find it how to find it in the key and then how to find it in two octaves and from that you're going to be able to play lots of just about anything and i'll give some examples of that but that's what we're going to be doing this in this video we're going to be talking it's like a little mini lesson on how to get started playing lead and those of you that have been playing for a while this may be elementary to you but then again there may be a few things that you hadn't thought about so it might be interesting just to watch even if you already know how to do it okay so the first thing you have to do before you can do anything is you have to know the key of the song and i don't care if you're playing along with a buddy or if you're at a blues jam it's on stage with a band or if you're playing along with a jam track it doesn't matter you have to the one thing the first thing you have to do is you have to know the key of the song if you're playing along with a jam track the odds are they've told you what the key is but uh in those other cases you don't know so the first thing that i learned to do and i don't remember how how i learned this but i took that high e string and i would just walk up the fretboard until i found a match to my ear so i'd play along i'd put the song on if it was an album on the radio or something and i would just keep going until i found a match actually i did a lesson on this which is ep160 so you can reference that it's a whole lesson with practice material if you want to deep dive on this but that's the premise of it is you find a match and chances are that's the key of the song not always the case but chances are even if it's not you'll figure out how to find out fairly quickly so that's the first thing is i find that the first the matching note i'll assume that's the key so let's say we landed on the fifth fret first string this is where you have to memorize the notes on your e string actually when you memorize the notes on your high e string you've memorized the notes on your low a string because they're both e's but you need to at least know that the dotted frets you know the the third fret which is a g the fifth fret which is an a seventh fret is a b you can get the sharps and flats later but try and get all the major uh the the non-accidental notes first um but anyway if we land on that fifth fret that's an a note which tells me we're playing in the key of a now here's the here this is the big take away uh for this the square shape that i was talking about if we look on that same fret if i jump down to the third string that's going to be the top left corner of the the box of the square from my vantage point not from yours but for mine that's the top left so here's the the fret numbers we're going to have five and seven on the third string and then we're gonna have five and seven on the fourth string that's it that's the box you can see the box there it's more like a rectangle i guess but you can picture a little box there now believe it or not with that box you've almost got the entire pentatonic scale there's only one extra note in addition to that but you can [Music] you can start to play music with those four notes and when i realized that it blew my mind that it was that simple it was just you know forget all the the patterns all over the neck i mean you'll get to that at some point but but the truth is those are four of the five notes of the the minor pentatonic scale which is where the blues comes from when you're playing lead blues lead okay there's one other little extension which i'll get to in a minute but we're gonna we're just gonna focus on that for now now when i mention patterns that's something that you hear lots of players myself included when i'm trying to explain something we talk about pattern one or pattern two all those patterns are are groupings of these same notes so like this little box here i could play that in different positions those same notes there it is there right same notes i'm just playing them in different patterns or different boxes that's all the pattern thing is is it splits up the fretboard into regions so i can hang out in a region for a while i might slide up a little higher but i'm really staying on those same notes and i didn't realize it took me years to figure out that that's what i thought that the scale you had all these extra notes it's really the same notes just repurposed so there's one other extension we're going to add to this watch this seventh fret fifth string that's the extra note now you have the entire pentatonic scale minor pentatonic scale so it's one two three four five it's those five notes that's the minor pentatonic scale everything else is just a reap a repetition of that you're playing the same notes in different spots so i'm going to we're not going to worry about all that for we can we can play the blues with this little box here and that extension i'm going to give you one other box though so we're going to take a look at we can the best anchor point i guess that i think of here is if i look at the seventh fret which is the corner of the box if i go up a fret which would be the eighth fret and i go to the second string and i play that and then i come up to the tenth fret and then i do the same thing on the first string 8 and 10. so 10 8 10 8 1 2. those are the string numbers look at that another box but look at that it's the same box it's played an octave higher so now you've got this box with the extension and you've got this box and look there's the extension there which would be the ninth fret third string so it's in the middle of the box or rectangle so now i've got these two octaves of the pentatonic scale and if you can connect it back to that first note that we started with you know you had to find the key of the song and i found it was an a so now i know where my box is in reference to that a and i know where this box is in reference to that box you can see it's all connected now i have all the tools i need to be able to express myself with a lead guitar now here's the next exercise i want you to do to take this to the next level is to play an a minor chord we're going to play a minor blues here for this this would work with major two by the way if we played an a major you'd still get that minor pentatonic blues sound but you could do it but we're going to play an a minor chord in fact the three chords are going to play it's going to be a one four five but they're going to be minor so minor one is an a minor a minor four is a d minor and then a minor five is an e minor if you don't want to play them here if you can't play bar chords play them down here a minor d minor e minor but what we're going to do is this play the a minor and then watch i'm going to play it again now there's a bin there i'll get to that in a minute we're going to do the d d minor [Music] back to the a minor now we're going to go to e minor [Music] now i slid into that second box i did it bad but back to the d back to the a now some of you are going wait how do you how are you doing that how do you know what notes you're landing on but your ear will dictate that and here's the thing if you land on any of those notes as long as you stay in that pentatonic scale it's going to be okay now some notes sound better than others but i could go land on that note or i could go [Music] or i could go even that note works i can make it work right and if it doesn't work you just adjust and you go to one that does or if it doesn't sound as good as it you want it to you just go to another note but that's the basic premise and it's easy to practice you don't need a jam track at least to do this just a minor d minor e minor and remember this here's another little sidebar a little takeaway is when you're going from this box up to this box there's a bridge so look at the bridge right there from the seventh fret to the ninth fret [Music] i'm sliding up the bridge right and remember that bridge is the bottom extension of that of that next box so now i've got [Music] and i can go up the bridge or back down the bridge but that's how i picture that i picture that little slide connection point connective tissue as i've heard tim pierce say between the seventh fret and the ninth fret and that's what it is and the everything else that you're going to hear or want to be able to do has to do with vibrato bins now the bend i did a bend before and i said i'd come back to that so this bend here when i'm bending the one note i can bend in this box is this top from my vantage points the top right corner so it's this one seventh fret third string i can do a bend there the other ones don't really sound as good i mean you could bend i guess on the on the fifth uh fret as well but i if you just to keep it simple this is your bendable note the rest of them don't don't worry about it same then would be true on this box right it's just an octave higher so practice that [Music] there's your extension right which was where the v chord is [Music] so anyway i'm making that up obviously and i didn't want to tab all this out because then this becomes a big production but i wanted to give you that as a just a a nice little starting point for for anybody that's trying to get going with playing the lead and so what i see is people are worrying so much about trying to learn all these patterns and learn them in all these different keys that they're missing the whole point the point isn't the patterns it's the point is to try and take those boxes like that those four notes or five notes rather and start making music with it and then you'll start to discover the patterns through that but start there with something simple like that and you can start expressing yourself now if you like that you'd like a deeper dive on that a lesson with some practice materials i did a lesson a while ago called ep311 so you can go to activemelody.com and look up that lesson you can just type in 311 and you'll get that lesson number and that goes over the the same two boxes and but the difference is there's a jam track that goes with it even if you don't do that just practice what i was showing you take the a minor chord play it a few times and then plays it's kind of a call-in response play that and then play a lead response to that and you'll start to hear it it works on acoustic electric you don't have to get out effects pedals all those excuses that always jump in the way you don't have them now you've got a few notes that's all you need to be able to express yourself hope you've enjoyed that we'll see in the next one

Channel: Active Melody

Views: 943,029

Rating: 4.9253931 out of 5

Keywords: lead guitar lesson, easy lead guitar lesson, beginner lead guitar, start playing lead guitar, easy guitar lesson, improvise on guiitar, where to start on gutiar, beginner guitar lesson, lead guitar tutorial, blues lead guitar, blues lead guitar lesson, music education, guitar education, online guitar lesson, online guitar instruction, guitar teacher online

Id: 4531xW670D4

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020