Intermediate guitarists
If you know your soloing fundamentals but feel like your playing sounds too mechanical, this class is for you.
10 days
Ahren will guide you through 10 days of step-by-step instruction with daily practice plans and assessments.
Give your guitar a voice
This class will help you become a more expressive lead guitarist by equipping you with techniques that capture the feel of the human voice.
Take the next step
Once you've mastered this challenge, keep learning with more challenges and guided Learning Pathways.
What you'll learn
In this class, Ahren breaks down core lead guitar techniques that will make your playing more expressive and vocal-like. Each day, you’ll work through guided exercises and musical examples designed to transform your solos from mechanical to musical.
- Develop a more expressive touch.
- Learn how to phrase like a singer.
- Hone essential lead guitar techniques.
Curriculum
Stay focused with this step-by-step learning program designed by our expert team of music educators.
Your guided learning experience
In this 10-day Challenge, Ahren will help you go beyond the notes to focus on expressing yourself through the guitar. From touch and articulation to dynamics and phrasing concepts, you’ll learn how to make your guitar lines feel like a great conversation.
Make your notes sing
We’ll kick off the class by focusing on the foundation of expressive playing: touch.
It’s what shapes every note you play and gives your phrasing its feel and personality.
Getting this under control is the first step toward making your guitar sound more like a voice.
Hone slides, vibrato, and bends
We’ll build on that foundation by dialing in your slides, vibrato, and bends.
These are the techniques that bring your notes to life and give your phrasing movement and emotion.
Learning how to control them is what turns simple ideas into expressive lines.
Improve your picking technique, dynamics, and solo phrasing
Next, we’ll focus on your picking hand to explore how it shapes your sound through attack and dynamics.
Then, you’ll learn how to shape your phrases creatively using dynamics and turn your solos into conversations using call and response.
Day 9. Combining Expressive techniques
We’ll wrap up by combining everything you’ve learned into full phrases and musical ideas. At this point, these techniques should really be settling in, and you’ll be just about ready for the next step in your playing.
Day 10. Harmonizing triads
For your final lesson, you'll learn how to use triads to support and harmonize your melodies. This opens the door to thinking beyond single-note lines and hearing your playing in a more musical, layered way.
Performances
Before you move on from this class, Ahren will challenge you to learn a song and put everything into practice in a real musical setting. This is your chance to apply the techniques in context and start making them your own.
Days 1-2. Make your notes sing and add expression to slides
In these first two lessons, you’ll start giving your guitar a voice by refining your touch and making phrases smoother with slides.
Day 1. How to make your notes sing
Improve control over your fretting hand by lightening your touch. Learn how to shape tone and articulation with an expressive lick.
Day 2. Expressive slide techniques
Unlike guitars, singers don’t have frets, so they can scoop or slide their notes easily. Learn how you can mimic this technique with half- and whole-note slides – as well as fretboard-spanning slides.
Days 3-5. Hone vibrato, bends, and slides
Leave your fingerprint on every phrase by focusing on the nuances of vibrato and bending in tune. Channel Whitney Houston with a subtle yet powerful technique called slide trills.
Day 3. Intentional vibrato
Vibrato is how you put your stamp on every lick and phrase. Learn how to add more intention behind your vibrato on both lower and higher strings.
Day 4. Bends
Bending just might be the coolest thing you can do on guitar, but it’s also one of the hardest techniques to get right. Learn how to train your ear to bend in tune with full and micro bends.
Day 5. Slide trills
Melisma is a technique that singers use to create lightning-fast note runs over a single word or syllable. You can mirror this by adding quick double shakes to your slides.
Days 6-8. Improve your picking technique, dynamics, and solo phrasing
Like a great conversation, guitar solos have ups and downs and leave room for phrases to respond to each other. In these lessons, you’ll learn how to control your pick attack and add dynamic variation to your lines, as well as how to incorporate call and response into your solos.
Day 6. Expressive picking techniques
You think you know picking, but do you really? In this lesson, you’ll zoom in on your picking technique and attack by experimenting with flatpicking, fingerstyle, and hybrid picking. Learn how to shape your tone using just your pick and fingers.
Day 7. Call and response
Strengthen the connection between the sound in your head and the notes on your fretboard. Then, use your voice and fingers to create musical conversations using a technique called call and response.
Day 8. Phrase dynamics
Turn your phrases into a conversational rollercoaster by experimenting with dynamics. This is a simple way to make even simple lines sound more like a singer.
Days 9-10. Apply your new skills and harmonize your lines with triads
This is where all of your hard work pays off. You’ll combine the techniques you learned throughout this class to build a vocal phrase over a track inspired by John Mayer’s Gravity, then you’ll finish off the class by harmonizing your lines using triads.
Day 9. Combining expressive techniques
It’s time to bring together skills like slide trills, bends, and call and response to build a singable phrase. You’ll also get more work on your dynamics while you home in on your touch and tone.
Day 10. Harmonizing triads
Even the most talented singers are limited to singing one note at a time. Guitarists, on the other hand, can play as many notes as our fingers can fret. In this final lesson, Ahren will break down the process for how to create rich chord-melody tapestries using triads.
Performances
Now that you’ve gotten your phrasing techniques down, you have the chance to apply them with blues- and R&B-inspired songs. Strengthen your melodic storytelling skills and dynamics while adding more songs to your guitarsenal.
REAL students
Don’t take our word for it, take theirs
What guitarists love about this course
FULL REFUND, NO QUESTIONS ASKED
Improve your playing or get your money back
We’re so confident that we can improve your playing that we’re underwriting your membership with a 60-day satisfaction guarantee.
Your Instructor
Ahren Shreeve
Ahren is a masterful lead guitarist known for his tasteful phrasing. His lessons will teach you how to bring a new level of expression into your own playing.
Explore LessonsWhat’s in every Pickup Music membership?
Try free for 14 days
1,000+ Lessons
All skill levels
Interactive tabs
Track your progress
Daily practice plans
Live lessons every week
Limitless learning.
All-inclusive access to every instrument and course.
.avif)
.avif)
Frequently asked questions
The most structured approach to learning music
