What more do i need to do to be a lead guitar player????

Question:Ive been playing guitar solidly for about 2 and half years. ive got heaps off things down. i can alternate pick fast, i can hammer-on, pull-off, bends, vibratos, i can improvise solos on the pentatonic scales and in different modes (lydian, phyrgian ETC....), i have a Gibson Flying V, and a Marshall AVt50x. i don't have any pedals so i was planning to master the wah wah.

THe only thing i have problems with is speed and some times strength on my fret hand. for example the chorus/second intro riff from Pantera's Cowboys From Hell is too quick for my hands to cope.. as is Guns N' Roses paradise city Solo when the song goes into double time.

What exercises should i do to build speed, and what else is it essential that i learn to do to become a half decent lead guitarist.?????

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Ive been playing guitar solidly for about 2 and half years. ive got heaps off things down. i can alternate pick fast, i can hammer-on, pull-off, bends, vibratos, i can improvise solos on the pentatonic scales and in different modes (lydian, phyrgian ETC....), i have a Gibson Flying V, and a Marshall AVt50x. i don't have any pedals so i was planning to master the wah wah.

THe only thing i have problems with is speed and some times strength on my fret hand. for example the chorus/second intro riff from Pantera's Cowboys From Hell is too quick for my hands to cope.. as is Guns N' Roses paradise city Solo when the song goes into double time.

What exercises should i do to build speed, and what else is it essential that i learn to do to become a half decent lead guitarist.?????

if you know the basics and theory, which it sounds like you do, you need to develop your own feel/technique. that being said, if you cant play exactly what Dimebag Darrell or Slash plays then that doesnt mean you wont be any good as a lead player. ive been playing 5 years and i answered this post because funny enough you said paradise city is a hard one for you, i only got it nailed down in the last few weeks, after 5 years! (i didnt work at it every day but, as youve already found im sure from learning hard licks, it takes a while for you to train your fingers to play what youre reading/hearing AND get into the flow of playing exactly as other guitarists play it.)

it sounds like you and I have similar tastes in music so I'll use Gunners and Pantera as references to what i'm explaining.

You said your problems are with speed and fret-hand strength. youve probably already made a good start with trying to mimic Dimebags stuff because he had massive thumb-pinky stretch and had the strength to perform bends and vibratos etc at the same time. Keep that up. Cowboys from Hell is a good example. Sweet Child o' Mine solo has timeless classic blues scale licks and bends in it so you can't go wrong there. A lot of Kirk Hammett licks such as them from Master of Puppets or Seek and Destroy, and, obviously, One, are excellent examples of double picking and tapping but great for fret-hand speed build-up too, he's not a super talented guitarist but his fretting hand is like lightning. that being said, he put some great bending techniques down on the Black Album in Enter Sandman and My Friend of Misery, and that album will also be a bit of help for when you invest in a wah pedal. Still, do not overlook Jimi Hendrix on the wah pedal, the blues minor petatonic and the twang-bar. He was God.

To sum it up, id have to repeat what i said at the top, youve got to adopt your own feel/flow of playing to be a lead guitarist, and obviously be skilled enough to write music. you can be as fast a guitarist as you want but if you sit down and try to nail paradise city or cowboys from hell in one day you probably couldnt, because youd not only have to learn the solos, youd have to teach yourself Slashs or Dimebags feel/flow.
Learning other guitarists material is not just for the sake of playing their stuff but learning their licks and feels and combining it can help you create your own style.
It can also help, in learning other guitarists material, to play the song in a music/splitting studio. that way you can slow the song down and/or break it up to learn small parts of it individually.
It can also help actually watching people who can play the solo/song so you can visually see what your fingers need to learn. You tube can help you there.

Paradise City solo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic3YSw_cW...

Mixing Studio:
http://www.code-it.com/wave_mp3_editor.h...

I know my opinion might clash with others who reply but this is just what has worked for me. Good Luck!

hahah funny u ask
broski imma tell u straight up
buy guitar hero
im the lead guiatist everytime on that game

try the steve vai 10/30 hour workouts.

keep repeating the exercises to a metronome, maybe keep a record of how your speed increases over time.

Try some of the Guitar Grimoire books, especially the Exercise book. There's enough in there to keep you learning for the rest of your career.

In order to become a half-decent lead guitarist it is absolutely essential that you are a good musician first of all.

This means a lot of things. One of them is having something to say with the guitar in the first place. Don't play a solo unless you mean it. In other words, don't play a solo in order to show that you can play a solo. Play a solo because the song needs a solo at that point, and only you can play it.

Another thing it means is: love music. Don't just listen to rock. You want to be better than half-decent, right? You will never be as good as the guys you like if you only listen to them. Broaden your taste as much as possible. Listen to jazz, to folk, to classical music - hell, listen to country. Brad Paisley is as scary a guitar player as anybody out there, and he's pure country music. But he listens to a lot of different stuff, and it all comes out in his playing. Lose any prejudices you may have about some kinds of music being better than others - no kind of music is better than any other, music is either played well or played badly.

Another thing it means is: speed is not everything. Emotion and meaning are far more important. There's a story about Jimi Hendrix - the great (and he is great) jazz-rock guitarist Larry Coryell once tried to beat Hendrix in a cutting contest. he played like mad for ten minutes, at top speed, using all his tricks, and then yielded the stage to Hendrix. Hendrix blew him off the stage with a single note, very long, enormous-sounding and played with more fire and soul than Coryell had managed to convey with all his speed.

Coryell is a great gutarist, but that's why Hendrix was better.

The lesson was spelled out by the great jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, who said that technique doesn't mean very much - if your music is strong, then your technique will be enough to convey it. If you feel you can't play what you want to play, it's only because your music isn't strong enough yet. (This is pretty funny coming from Taylor, who can play absolutely anything, but never mind.)

Don't worry that you can't play that Pantera riff yet, or Slash's solo in Paradise City - keep practising, you will get there, and when you get there you will realise that it's not really such a big deal after all, because it's not your music. Playing your own music is far more rewarding and far more of a real challenge. But learning other people's solos is a good start.