Basics of Lead Guitar Phrasing
Phrasing is a concept that can be applied to lead guitar playing and is a very useful thing to start thinking about in the early stages of your journey to becoming a great lead player. Phrasing is a concept based around how notes are played, rather than the specific notes you do choose to play.
Phrasing is something that is quite unique to each individual guitar player. Every single player will hear, and phrase, notes in their own way. This is what gives our favourite players their own unique sounds and feels.
For this lesson, the examples in the video are all using the A Minor Pentatonic scale in the first position, but this concept can apply to any scale in any position or key that you want.
A great exercise to work on phrasing is to take 4 notes from your scale. In the video you’ll see this demonstrated with the 5th and 7th frets on the D and G strings. Once you’ve picked 4 notes from the scale, pick a backing track in the key that you’re working with.
Over that track, play only those 4 notes. Use techniques like hammer ons, pull offs, bends, slides and vibrato, but only work off 4 fretted notes on the guitar.
By limiting the number of notes you play, it forces you to listen more to HOW you play those notes. Think about the number of different ways you can play just 4 notes by thinking about note length, space and technique.
Think about leaving gaps in your playing, or trying to play faster licks with less notes. Every aspect of this will tune your musical ear to listen to how you play things.
Sometimes when you look at an entire scale, or a collection of scales, you can sometimes feel overwhelmed with options and not know where to begin. Using this less is more approach is a great way to develop phrasing ideas.
Once you feel comfortable working in a single, 4 note position, you can change key or scale shape. You can even add more notes to your 4 note box. Try adding an extra 2 notes and making it a 6 note box and only working within that.
This limitation is a great way to start thinking about and listening to what you play and how you play it, and removing the temptation to just run up and down a scale.
Check out the demonstration of this in the attached video.