Many lead guitar parts and solos can be based more on the chords they are playing over rather than notes from a scale. Here, we’ll learn how to do that and get some ideas on how to make it sound great!

An arpeggio is a chord but played one note at a time. In this context, we’ll want to play the chord higher up the neck so it sounds like a lead part, especially when playing over backing tracks (that are available for free with this course in the dashboard area!)

Great examples include the intro of Where The Street Have No Name by U2, many songs by The Eels and the classic intro of Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin!

In the video tutorial, I demo the chord sequence C major to F major, played like this.

|C                              F                       |C                                F                               |

The TAB below show different ways we could solo over this chord sequence using arpeggios of the C major chord and the F major chord. However, these should be used as examples only. As long as the chord you use in the arpeggio matches the chord in the backing track, you could pick ANY string and it will always sound right!

Arpeggio example 1

Arpeggio example 2