This tutorial is based on the wonderful Peter Green blues piece ‘Need your Love so Bad’. The exercise is designed to give you some lead guitar tricks that work with the various types of chord used in this piece. There are major, minor and diminished chords. The lead guitar closely follows these accompanying chords with various licks from the blues scale, sixth intervals and string bends.
Let’s start by looking at the chords.
Rhythm guitar
The chord progression is:
The 
time signature is the foundation of the groove here.
(‘Memory’ from the musical Cats is a popular example of this time signature.)
Each bar contains twelve evenly spaced beats. These are divided into half with an accent on the first beat of each group.
To help with the strumming and lead playing count each bar like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Before you start playing get in the groove by tapping your foot and counting. Listen to the rhythm.
The easier chord shapes are:
Alternative chords shapes are:
Lead guitar
BAR 1
This lick uses the F# blues scale. It works around the notes of notes of the ‘A’ chord. Your fretting hand should be in the second position with each finger ready to play notes on consecutive frets. 
So your first finger ready to play any notes at the second fret, second finger ready to play notes at the third fret etc.
The ‘½’ symbol indicates a semitone (one-fret) string bend and release. Bend this note with your third finger.
BAR 2
Sixth intervals are used here. Fret the first note with your second finger. This finger should remain on the third string throughout the bar and form the lower note of each pair.
BAR 3
The fingering of this phrase is the same as the previous bar. It has just been moved higher up the fretboard to the tenth position. So, first finger ready at the seventh fret etc.
BAR 4
This sixth interval slides down the fretboard three frets at a time. Each time the notes in the interval can be found in the accompanying diminished (‘o’) chord.
BAR 5
This is the same as the first bar.
BAR 6
Again, this is a repeat of the previous phrase but moved up the fretboard to the seventh position.
BAR 7
Here the ideas from bars two and three are both used within one bar to work over the two accompanying chords that are now only a half bar each in duration.
BAR 8
This is the same as the first bar. However the last note has been changed to work with the final chord.
All of these licks can be moved to work over similar chords on different root-notes. For example, the first lick works on ‘A’ chord. If you move it up two frets it will work over a ‘B’ chord.
Please get in contact if you have any questions.
Backing Track