If you want to learn to play lead electric guitar then start learning the pentatonic scale. It's the most popular scale for playing rock, blues country, and heavy metal. Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, etc.
What Is A Pentatonic Scale?
By definition, a pentatonic scale has 5 notes per octave - for example, an A minor pentatonic scale contains the notes A, C, E, G, and A.
Pentatonic scales come in major and minor flavors. You can play a pentatonic minor scale over minor and major chord progressions --- and a major pentatonic scale works over major chords. An Am pentatonic uses the same notes as a C major pentatonic scale and an E minor pentatonic uses the same notes (same box) as a G major pentatonic.
Adding Personal Touches
You can embellish these licks with all the techniques you know such as bending, sliding, vibrato, hammer on and pull off.
Once you develop some familiarity with the box 1 of the pentatonic scale you can practically turn on the radio and begin to play along with whatever song is on. Well, that's probably a slight exaggeration by you'll see that as you play along your ear will develop and more and more. And you'll get a sense for which notes of the scale get played over which chords in the progression.
You can begin to learn popular and cliche licks and add them to your own songs. - you can learn to recognize the changes in a song - especially the I-IV-V chord progression songs - and you can also make up your own licks - and write them down or record them so you don't forget them!
And when you make up your own licks don't play notes next to each other too much -- that'll sound like a scale -- skip around and even skip strings and you'll come up with beautiful pentatonic-based licks that'll be all your own.
There's nothing more fun that playing along with your favourite songs on the radio. It's encouraging as you learn guitar - And it builds a lot of familiarity with popular chord changes and how to play on top of them.
