The Pentatonic Scale is the cornerstone of rock soloing, serving as an essential tool for crafting memorable melodies, and expressive licks. In the following tutorial, we'll dive into the Major and Minor Pentatonic Scale Boxes and learn how to start creating licks with them. We'll learn to play a few simple licks with each scale, and finish up with a practice tune that combines everything we've learned.

In Guitar Fundamentals 1 you learned the minor pentatonic scale, and we tried a very basic example of what's called improvisation, where you simply make it up as you go. Now we'll add two notes to our minor pentatonic scale pattern, which will give us a lot of cool, bluesy tension to play around with when we improvise. When we add these two notes to the pattern, we call it the blues scale.

If you're looking to be more expressive and dynamic in your lead playing, then learning about hammer-ons and pull-offs is a great technique to get under your fingers. The basic concept is fairly simple: a hammer-on is hammering your finger onto the fret without picking it, creating a tone. The pull-off is the equal and opposite. We'll work on building finger strength, using the pentatonic and dorian scale, playing legato, using open strings, and how to "pull-hammer-slide".

In these rock soloing technique lessons, we'll be teaching you some essential bends and vibrato technique that will aid you in your lead playing. You'll be learning four types of bends here: up and down bends, pre-bends, bend and choke, and bending one string but not the other. Next we'll show you some vibrato technique, then put all of it together.

Christopher will show you some basic blues licks that form the foundation of blues soloing vocabulary. This includes the following characteristics of blues lead playing: using the blues scale (minor pentatonic scale with flat 5th "blue note"), triplet swing phrasing, dynamics and articulations like sliding and bending. This is essentially a primer on playing single note melody lines in a blues style to start building a repertoire of blues licks.

Christopher will show you some basic blues licks that form the foundation of blues soloing vocabulary. This includes the following characteristics of blues lead playing: using the blues scale (minor pentatonic scale with flat 5th "blue note"), triplet swing phrasing, dynamics and articulations like sliding and bending. This is essentially a primer on playing single note melody lines in a blues style to start building a repertoire of blues licks.

Christopher will show you some basic blues licks that form the foundation of blues soloing vocabulary. This includes the following characteristics of blues lead playing: using the blues scale (minor pentatonic scale with flat 5th "blue note"), triplet swing phrasing, dynamics and articulations like sliding and bending. This is essentially a primer on playing single note melody lines in a blues style to start building a repertoire of blues licks.

In this tutorial Anders will show you some basic but classic rock style lead guitar licks that form the foundation of all rock lead vocabulary.

In this tutorial Anders will show you a basic pentatonic lick that is widely used in rock style lead guitar solos and how to play variations on the basic lick to build your rock lead guitar vocabulary.