Technique Essentials - Modern Legato

8/18/2019 Technique Essentials - Modern Legato

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Copyright www.tomquayle.co.uk 2012

Technique Essentials:-Modern Legato (with Hybrid Picking) Technique

Part 1

Welcome to this tutorial on my approach to legato (with hybrid picking). Firstly let me thankyou for your support and for purchasing this video. I hope you enjoy it and it helps you insome way with your playing. This extensive video tutorial is be split into two parts – thisbeing part one. Part one deals with the basics of the technique, working with different sub-divisions and note groupings, time feel, scalar playing, utilising arpeggios andincorporating a hybrid picking approach for the right hand, providing you with a series oflines to practice and help you develop your own ideas. Part two will expand on these basictechniques using chromaticism, wide stretches, playing over changes, string skipping,palm muted techniques and developing improvisational ability with legato. Each lesson willbe accompanied by a full practice session (available April 2012) that will give you a fullpractice regime to develop your technique as well as your understanding. With that said,let’s begin!

I've always found alternate and economy picking to be my weakest areas of technique asa guitar player. I'd be the first to admit that much of the technique I use these days hascome about as a direct result of frustration due to my lack of picking ability and theinevitable search for other ways to perform the music I hear in my head.

Two techniques that came far more naturally to me were Legato and Hybrid picking. Bothfavour a very relaxed right hand with very little movement meaning that I could pull ofcomplex and quick lines without affecting my time feel and dynamics. Through practicing

these techniques and developing them to suit my style I've come up with a fairly uniqueapproach to articulating my lines. In this tutorial I'd like to take you through my thoughtprocess and the techniques I use, applying them to different musical situations as we go.There are notated examples throughout with accompanying backing tracks for you to tryyour own ideas and approaches on. I recommend that, rather then learn the lines in thistutorial note for note, you should take the concepts and fragments of ideas, applying themto your own playing as best you can, trying to make each line your own.

One of the first things I discovered when I began to really work at my legato was that mytiming was very poor. I could certainly perform hammer ons and pull offs more quickly than

I could pick but I couldn't play lines of 8th or 16th notes with a solid time feel, placingaccents where I wanted them to be. I seemed to be producing a triplet sound regardless ofwhich subdivision I actually wanted to play. For me, legato players seemed to fall into twocategories: -

1 Those who use legato technique to play fast and fluid lines that seem to cross overthe time. Many different, subtle subdivisions are used in the same line as notes arecrammed into each beat more as a textural device than playing a specificsubdivision of the bar. Speed is more the issue than time feel and lines tend to bevery scalar/pattern based in nature. John Petrucci and Joe Satriani style legatoseemed to come from this catagory for me.

2 Those who play more solid, 'in time' legato, using specific subdivisions of the beatwith great authority and are fully in control of note groupings and accents within thetechnique. Lines tend to be more sophisticated and arpeggio/scale based with



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chromatic passing tones and stick more solidly to 8th note and 16th notesubdivisions. This approach has the authority of picked lines but with the inherentlysmoother sounds given by hammer ons and pull offs. Players such as AllanHoldsworth and Brett Garsed are proponents of this school of playing.

Both approaches are very valid ways to approach the technique but it was always thesecond method that appealed to me the most. As Allan Holdsworth is known to say, thetechnique offers a more ‘horn-like’ sound and smoothness than picking but the same levelof rhythmic control.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the problems I faced when I started to work on this style ofplaying was caused by the way I was visualizing my scales. I saw everything using the 3note per string (3nps) system. Any system that groups scales in fingering patterns such asthis will lend itself best to being played in the rhythmic subdivision that matches thenumber of notes per string. In other words if you play 3nps you’ll usually create a tripletfeel where the rhythmic stress or accent is on the first note of each three note grouping.

This effect becomes more evident the faster you play as the control required to placeaccents where you want them becomes less conscious and more sub-conscious. Theproblem is further compounded by the likelihood that the first note on each new string islikely to be performed with the pick, giving a harder attack and re-enforcing this triplet feel.If you want a 4 note grouping such as 8 th or 16 th notes it requires a great deal of control tokeep these in time and feel/perform the accents in the correct place. Unlike picking, a lot ofleft hand control is required to get these accents feeling good. The same rings true whentrying to play pentatonic scales 2nps and perform triplets or groups of 3 using legato. You’llquickly find that feeling and performing the correct groupings is tricky when the scaleshapes don’t fit comfortably into the sub-divisions you’re using.

The way I worked on getting control over my ability to phrase and feel 16 th notes on 3npsscales was two fold. Firstly I slowed everything down a great deal, giving my fingers andbrain a chance to be fully in control of what I was doing. This way I could really focus onmapping out both aurally and physically what the 16 th note groupings felt like. The secondelement was to iron out any discrepancies in my right hand where I was placing accents inthe wrong place. This usually occurred when changing strings as the first note on eachstring was performed using the pick, giving a much stronger attack than a hammer on orpull off. Again I slowed everything right down and worked on reducing the pick attack tobecome closer dynamically to my legato notes. This is where the hybrid picking came in asI quickly found that using my middle finger on the right hand to pick the first note on eachnew string gave me results much closer to a hammered note. The hybrid picking has sinceexpanded a great deal for other reasons but we’ll get into that later in another tutorial.

Once I had these exercises under my fingers I stuck with them for around 6 months tryingnot to speed anything up at all. I am firmly of the belief that if you practice slowly enoughfor long enough, the muscles and brain learn the required motor skills in a sub-consciousway and the technique becomes ‘easy’ for you. At this point your creativity takes over andthe technique has become part of your repertoire. One thing I have found is that once thetechnique is in place at this sub-conscious level it really does feel easy and the speed is

just a by product of that ease. One of the most important things I’d like to stress in this

tutorial is to keep things slow and be patient – your fingers will know when the technique isready and one day you’ll find yourself using it as naturally as you do with driving, riding a



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bike or cleaning your teeth! Patience and dedicated practice is the key to success. Butthen you knew that already!

Another hugely important aspect of playing legato is to develop a feel for how 16 th notelines (and triplet based lines for that matter) feel under the fingers when we’re not justrunning scales or exercises. I really like to emphasize to my students an exploratoryapproach to the fretboard where you play slowly and let the left hand go where it wantswithin the diatonic framework of the key that you’re in. Try starting off playing constant 8 th notes at a very slow tempo attempting to keep a line going no matter what happens. Thisis a challenge unto itself and requires a lot of concentration and prepared fretboardknowledge. There is no substitute for simply learning your scales all over the fretboard andno magic to this – it simply takes time and must be done in order to improvise freely. Try tothink ahead as much as you can and visualize where your line is going a few notes inadvance. As you get better at this you’ll be able to target notes well in advance of actuallyarriving at them. Think about changing direction as often as possible and moving aroundthe neck using legato slides and position changes. If you find yourself repeating the same

lines over and over, drop the tempo and try again making a conscious effort to avoidrepetition as much as possible. Within the video and accompanying lines PDF I’veprovided you with a series of 16 th note lines if you struggle to make your own. They’rerelatively simple and should be seen as a starting point from which you can create yourown with the eventual aim of being able to improvise in the same manner. Using a difficulttechnique improvisationally is often much harder than using the same technique on linesthat are learnt or written. A LOT of practice is required to make a technique freely availableto you in an improvised context.

After much practice this will become a great deal easier and you’ll be able to find andvisualize lines much more quickly. Now try the same exercise with 16 th notes. Once youfeel comfortable move on and tackle triplet groupings. You can take the same 16 th notelines and play them as triplets. You’ll find the lines feel completely different to playrequiring a different level of control as far as the legato technique goes. Your accents mustfall in different places and you must feel the lines in triplet groupings, controlling thosegroupings with the left hand as well as the right.

Finally for this lesson, let me provide you with some technical tips that will hopefullyimprove both your technique and time feel.

1 - Keep the thumb of the left hand in the middle of the back of the neck and behind yoursecond finger. This will allow the best support for the fingers and the largest stretch foryour legato playing.

2 – Try not to move the palm of the hand whilst performing hammer-ons and especially pulloffs. The hand can move up and down in relation to which string you’re playing but thepalm should not move in any way that changes the angle of the fingers in relation to theneck. This means that there is consistency for the left hand and the muscles in the handcan work at their most efficient.

3 – Relax! On a guitar that is well setup you do not need much left hand pressure or

tension to perform good legato technique. In fact the opposite is true. You must be relaxedand use small movements in order to maintain speed and stamina. This is especially truewhen using all 4 fingers on one string or when performing big stretches or complex lines.





















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Technique Essentials - Modern Legato

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