A lot of blues guitar leads are improvised. That means that they are making up their leads as they go along, right? That’s true to a certain extent, but every good guitar player has a “trick bag” of guitar licks that he/she can pull from at any time. In this beginner blues lead lesson you’ll add several common licks to your “trick bag”.

There are a couple of things that you need to know before you’re
ready to proceed with this lesson.

First of all you must be able to read tab. Second, you need to learn and memorize the scale below. Don’t worry if you can’t play it fast.

Just practice going up and down the scale.

Foundations Of A Blues Guitar Solo

The scale pattern above is just the same 5 notes over and over:
A, C, D, E, G.

Once your comfortable with the scale pattern above, you’re ready to move on and learn a few blues licks that you can add to your “trick bag”.

Basic Licks

Start playing the licks below VERY SLOWLY. You must concentrate on making them sound as clean as possible. Don’t muddy them up with bad bends, missed notes, or ringing open strings.

They may seem a little hard to learn at first. Once you are able to play them clean you’ll find that you’re able to increase the speed at which you play them in a short amount of time.

Note that all the licks pull their notes from the scale we learned earlier.

1. Bend the 7th fret with your second or third finger.

2. This one is very similar to the lick above.

3. This one is harder.

Practice Time

Okay, at this point you’ve got a little bit of work to do. Practice
playing the scale pattern and the 3 basic licks. Once you can
play them at a clean decent pace you’ll be ready to move on to
lesson 2.