There’s nothing like playing lead guitar. When you play solo, you are the center of attention. Everyone else in the band is there to support you. But becoming a good lead guitarist, I mean really good, takes years of hard work. Following these five steps will make mastering lead guitar easier.

Step One – Learn the CAGED Guitar System

The CAGED guitar system is the best way to make sense of the maze that is the guitar fretboard. There are many books and websites that illustrate this method of understanding how the notes are laid out on the guitar, so this information is very easy to find. If you’ve never heard of CAGED, or never taken the time to learn it, this should be your primary goal before learning anything else. CAGED will help you in all aspects of your progress as a guitarist.

Step Two: Learn Your Scales

Every serious musician spends a lot of time working on scales. One difficult aspect of the guitar is that it is possible to play the exact same notes on different strings, so guitarists must learn the exact same scales on different areas of the fretboard. Understanding CAGED guitar will make this much easier.

Your first consideration when learning any scale should be to visualize the scale pattern on the guitar fretboard and train your fingers to find the notes on their own. Go slow and steady.

After a while, tap the scale up and down to the beat of your metronome, set it to a slow or moderate beat. Increase the tempo slowly over time. It is very helpful to keep a practice journal in which you record what you play, what tempo you play it at, and some general notes.

Step Three: Learn Your Arpeggios

Simply put, you are playing an arpeggio when you play the notes of a chord individually. The easiest way to play an arpeggio is to hold any chord and play each string one at a time.

But arpeggios are derived from scales, and it is absolutely necessary that you become familiar with each arpeggio within each scale pattern that you learn. Mastery of arpeggios will allow you to play solos that give musical meaning to the chords you play your solos over. In short, it will sound like he knows what he is doing and his improvisation will be more musical.

Step four: make some music

We all need to spend a lot of time practicing and playing exercises, but as soon as you have a scale under your fingers, you should start experimenting with it. Play and try to invent good melodies. Find some quality backing tracks, or use a computer program that allows you to create your own backing tracks and play around with the scale.

Keep it simple at first, and over time, as you get more comfortable, try to find music to play that combines scales so you can learn to do what jazz musicians call “playing through the changes.” Be sure to include arpeggios in your lines, as well as scale movement.

Step Five: Analyze the Big Ones

In the last 20 years, guitar tablature has become extremely prominent. You can go online and find several different tab interpretations of just about any piece of popular music out there. The problem is that many guitarists are learning these lines without knowing how the music works.

With your experience working with scales and arpeggios, you are in a position not only to learn the guitar lines of great guitarists, but also to analyze them. When you understand what goes into a great guitar solo, you can take the musical principles of the music and apply them to your own guitar solos. In other words, don’t just copy the greats, analyze them.