How to Play Beautiful Lead Acoustic Guitar // Another Guitar Show Episode 4

In this episode we really focus in on how to bring your acoustic playing to life. We have some great tips to get your acoustic chords and lead playing sounding fantastic, without making too many changes to your playing style.

For a complete writeup of the show with chord and neck diagrams for each jam PLUS the audio jam tracks that accompany this video, head to the Your Guitar Academy website here!

Jam 1: Spangly chords

Rhythm Guitar

For our first little jam we are in the key of E major, and we are using basic chord shapes with a bit of 'spangle'! This generally means inserting some open chord shapes.

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Lead Guitar

We begin by playing the E major scale on the B string, which also keeping the open E string ringing out, similar to my tutorials for High And Dry by Radiohead. We also used the major pentatonic scale and major scale to play this lead improvisation.

Learn exactly how to do all of this from the ground up in both my Intermediate Course and my Acoustic Lead Guitar course.

Jam 2: 4 chord magic

For our second jam we are in the key of C major. On the rhythm side of things, we are using four basic chords, as shown below, but the chord shapes are varied all the way through. 

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Jam 3: Jazzy minor chill!

For our final jam we are vamping between two chords, the Bm7 and the E7. We are using the fingers rather than the plectrum to give ut a more 'elevator / jazz bar' sound. Thomas also uses a percussive slap as well to really bring it to life. Here are those chords.

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Lead: Dorian mode

Don't be scared of the Dorian mode! All we're is doing to get that awesome sound is taking the B minor pentatonic scale shape 1, and adding in two extra notes. These scales are shown below as well as the backing track for you to try to jam over.

For a complete writeup of the show with chord and neck diagrams for each jam PLUS the audio jam tracks that accompany this video, head to the Your Guitar Academy website here!