I can’t think of one guitar player I know who didn’t want to play lead guitar at one point or another, and why wouldn’t they? Playing lead guitar is awesome! But what most people didn’t know when they were starting out is that your ability to play lead guitar is only as good as your ability to keep guitar rhythm.
Before you start learning every scale in every scale book in the world, take some time to really hone your rhythm skills. One of the most important things to know about lead guitar is rhythm: when do you play that flurry of notes? How long should you sustain one note? You find those answers when you spend a lot of time working on your rhythm.
Check out this lesson and learn the basics on LATIN RHYTHMS
Additionally, playing rhythm guitar and understanding how chords are put together is one of the most important things about playing lead guitar. When you’re soloing over a chord progression, it’s easy to think that you can just play whatever notes you want, but playing the right notes over the right chords at the right time is extremely important. That’s what separates great lead players from wannabes.
Another thing that beginner guitar players don’t usually think about is that people really don’t care to listen to just a lead player. It’s a lot easier to keep people’s attention if you can strum a few chords and sing over them; soloing may be fun, but if that’s all you can do, you’re not going to be any fun for people to listen to.
Here’s another thing to think about: when you’re first starting to play the guitar, you don’t usually have a band to play with you, so you’re by yourself learning to strum. Without a band backing you, soloing sounds pretty boring.
Take your time and really learn the fundamentals of rhythm guitar before you obsess about soloing. If you feel comfortable with your ability to play rhythm guitar, take a look at some of our other lessons on lead guitar.
I also want to recommend to you a good course about rhythm guitar! Check it out: