Combining Rhythm And Lead
I recently finished updating some of my favorite older tutorials that cover bridging the gap between playing rhythm and lead playing. Here’s a play along excerpt from one of the tutorials.
This is something that I’ve seen many students struggle with: making the transition from strumming chords to playing licks. This is because they require distinctly different physical techniques. Rhythm guitar techniques require relatively large size motions, strumming chords and riffs. But lead guitar techniques require much smaller size, precise motions in order to play a series of single notes that make up a lead lick or fill.
With that in mind I developed a series of exercises that combine both rhythm and lead techniques. You alternate between them, playing a simple chord or rhythm part for a measure or 2, then you switch to a lead fill idea for the next measure or 2. I started with very simple exampes & then gradually increased the difficulty.
I started very simple with one chord for the rhythm part and 4 quarter notes for a fill part.
The next one turns it up a notch by expanding the single chord to 3 chords to form a whole 12 bar blues and the licks are bumped up to 1/8th notes!
The 3rd tutorial in the series moves the idea to a fretted key. So it’s still a 3 chord 12 bar blues, but using all barred chords, while the lead fills are expanded to playing all the pentatonic boxes.
The 4th tutorial is a classic rock move using diads for the riffs and the fills!
The final 2 tutorials really ramp up the ideas to include fun and classic blues riffs and fills.
https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=1849
Enjoy learning and playing some rhythm and lead guitar skills!