Twelve Ways Into Lead Guitar
My new electric guitar has arrived: a Sire S3 HSS New Gen, which is a Strat-style guitar rather than an actual Fender Stratocaster. It has the familiar double-cutaway body, three-pickup layout and five-way selector switch, with a humbucker at the bridge to give it rather more weight when required.
I took it to my lesson this week, where Stewart plugged it into his amplifier, took it through its paces and began explaining what some of the controls actually do. Next week we begin my first proper electric lead-guitar lesson.
Stewart asked me to send him a list of between six and twelve tracks containing guitar work that particularly interests me. He will then select suitable songs, find backing tracks where possible and use them to construct a lead-guitar course which reflects my own tastes rather than marching me through a generic syllabus.
The list below is therefore not an attempt to rank my favourite blues-rock guitar performances. It is arranged, very approximately, in the order in which I might conceivably be able to play them. The really fast, intricate, virtuoso material I enjoy has largely been excluded on the sad grounds that I cannot conceivably play it.
Even some of the later performances here would plainly have to be reduced to selected phrases or sections. One does not begin learning electric lead guitar by reproducing Walter Trout or Joe Bonamassa note for note.
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Cream — Sunshine of Your Love
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Fleetwood Mac — Need Your Love So Bad
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Bad Company — Can’t Get Enough
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Free — All Right Now
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Gary Moore — Parisienne Walkways
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Led Zeppelin — The Rover
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Rory Gallagher — Bad Penny
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Cream — Crossroads
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Joe Bonamassa — You Upset Me Baby, live at Rockpalast
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Joanne Shaw Taylor featuring Joe Bonamassa — Summertime, live
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Led Zeppelin — Since I’ve Been Loving You
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Walter Trout — Girl from the North Country
The list is heavily weighted towards the late 1960s and 1970s, which is hardly surprising.
So, we start next week.
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