Best Books to Learn How to Play Lead Guitar

Looking for the best books on how to play lead guitar? It takes time for a guitarist to gain the knowledge and playing skills to become a good lead guitar player. Use these books in your own practice sessions to develop your musical style. As you develop as a player you can try new books and techniques. As a general rule it will be easier to solo if you use lighter strings on the treble side of your guitar, which makes guitar tricks such as bending much easier.

Lead Licks: Over 200 Licks in All Styles (Hal Leonard)

This book helps you take the same tired licks and turn them into different styles. The book covers most major styles. Once you finish the book you’ll have guitar licks that cover almost any playing situation. The book comes with a CD so you can hear the lick played at a slow tempo and full speed.

Mel Bay Presents Fluid Soloing – Book 1 Arpeggios for Lead Rock Guitar (Tim Quinn)

This book covers modern arpeggios and teaches you how to play fast arpeggio runs to connect your entire fret board. You’ll learn arpeggios that incorporate hammer-ons and pull-offs as well as position-shifting arpeggios. The arpeggios are combined into soloing etudes that you can then practice what you have learned. This book will help any guitarist regardless of style solo with arpeggios over chord progressions. This is a fantastic arpeggio book that belongs in your lead guitar book collection.

Rhythmic Lead Guitar: Solo Phrasing, Groove and Timing for All Styles (Barrett Tagliarino)

This book and CD teaches you rhythmic lead guitar techniques. learn how to count music regardless of your level to find the right feel for the songs you want to play. You’ll learn exact timing for bends, slides, legato, and other lead guitar techniques. You don’t need to know how to read music notation to read this book because you’ll learn some music notation as you work through this publication. You get over 150 music examples intablature and regular notation. The CD includes slow tempos for all the examples.

Chord Tone Soloing: A Guitarist’s Guide to Melodic Improvising in Any Style (Barrett Tagliarino)

Learn how the master guitar players create solos with this book and CD package. The CD includes 68 tracks of exercises, licks, and solos from the book. You’ll learn what to play and practice regardless of your level. You’ll learn how to solo over any progression, regardless of the musical style using chords for endless sources of ideas.

Improvising Lead Guitar: Total Beginner with CD (Tony Skinner)

Lead Guitar Advice As you develop your lead guitar style there’s a few things you can do to improve your playing. The first is to get yourself a metronome and practice your scales along with the metronome. Keep increasing the tempo of the metronome and see how fast you can play while still keeping in time. Another thing you can do is to get a speed or phrase training so you can slow down recordings and learn those fast guitar solos of your favorite artists. Be sure to play with jam tracks or other artists which is the best way to get your timing down and to advance as a lead guitar player.