Metal Lead

Ready to play metal guitar solos that sound fast, dark and deliberate? This chapter gives you the three lead tools that metal players reach for again and again: the harmonic minor scale, fast pentatonic runs and pedal-point licks.

You start with A harmonic minor, the natural minor with a raised seventh that gives neoclassical metal its exotic edge, and use it for scale runs, a short lick and E major to A minor arpeggios. Then you work on fast E minor pentatonic runs at the 12th fret: fours, pull-off triplets and repeated bursts that end in a bend. The pedal-point lesson puts a repeated note under a moving melody on one string, the classic neoclassical sound. Finally, a metal lick library gives you three original licks, from a trill and bend to a diminished arpeggio that resolves to A minor.

Each tab plays in your browser with a click and a tempo ladder, so you can build speed step by step, and every lesson ends with a checkpoint. You'll come out with cleaner alternate picking and licks you can drop into your own solos.