Phrasing is a technique used on lead guitar playing that gives certain goodness to it. You can play lead guitar all you want but all you would come up with is some robotic lifeless piece of crap if you don’t know phrasing. Of course you also need to learn other guitar techniques that are also essential but phrasing captures that all. You could do guitar techniques inside a phrasing. So what is phrasing? It’s like phrasing in verbal terms. Like speaking or singing, you do in phrases and sentences. It is the same with playing the guitar; you have to deliver it in phrases.

Personally, no one never really thought me about phrasing, it just came out naturally. I just watched blues guitar players such as BB King and SRV and checked out how they do guitar solos and back then I never knew that it was called phrasing, the way they divide their solos within a bar using rests and time signatures. Anyway, if you have reached a certain level of flexibility and mastery in playing the guitar, phrasing would be easy. But for beginners, start with learning the time signatures because you will be dividing notes with that.