Chris Sherland has just completed a unique interactive iBook called “Lead Guitar From The Inside Out” for iPad. The ebook uncovers some of the more-hidden elements of becoming a great lead guitarist. The general focus and concept of the lessons are that you can get great benefit from exploring what you already know in addition to chasing techniques and stuff that you don’t know yet. Twelve subjects are covered with over an hour of video instruction.

  1. Constraints: This section is about employing simple limits to expand creative choices. This idea allows you to think with your head and ears rather than just your hands.
  2. Target notes: Explores choosing notes in single lines and solos that define the harmony. This concept attaches your melodic phrasing to the chords you are playing over and increases the level of interest in your solos and lead lines.
  3. Sufficiency: Suggests ways to identify when and how not to overplay, and to stay in touch with what your job is as a lead guitarist within the song you’re playing.
  4. Dump your first idea: This section explores the idea of resisting your habitual responses and thereby opening up to new possibilities. This concept puts your musicianship front and center, and gives you the ability to create new music rather than just rehash what your practicing all the time.
  5. Create space: Choosing not to play in order to create tension and build musical capital is explained in this section. Controlling the space as well as the notes gives the notes you DO play more impact.
  6. Touch and tone: Every sound you make on the guitar starts with your hands, here some ideas and exercises are offered towards getting your attention focused on the sounds your fingers and hands make, and how to improve your results here.
  7. Scale sequencing: This section discusses how using note sequencing to re-invent the scale patterns you already know, gets you more mileage out of them.
  8. Long form scales: Here the idea of playing scale forms using notes-per-string constraints, and octave patterns exposes how much more use you can get from scales you have already mastered.
  9. Major minor swapping: By changing scales within a single phrase you can shift the harmonic tension you create at a much higher frequency. This makes your melodic phrasing much more interesting.
  10. Licks: Here some exercises are offered showing how you can take the licks you rely on already, and mutate them across the neck, into new keys, and expand on them.
  11. Vibrato: An often overlooked technique that can always benefit from a litte focused attention. This section simply dissects what vibrato is and how you can effectively improve it.
  12. Bending: Again, a simple technique that can have a huge impact in defining the “maturity” of a guitarists overall playing style. Here we look at what bending is all about and how to get great results.

 
For more info head over to Chris Sherland’s website at http://www.leadguitarfromtheinsideout.com/ and also his Facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/LeadGuitarFromTheInsideOut.