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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 thank you for your support and for purchasing this video. I hope you enjoy it and it helps you in some way with your playing. This extensive video tutorial is be split into two parts – this being part one. Part one deals with the basics of the technique, working with different subdivisions and note groupings, time feel, scalar playing, utilising arpeggios and incorporating a hybrid picking approach for the right hand, providing you with a series of lines to practice and help you develop your own ideas. Part two will expand on these basic techniques using chromaticism, wide stretches, playing over changes, string skipping, palm muted techniques and developing improvisational ability with legato. Each lesson will be accompanied by a full practice session (available April 2012) that will give you a full practice 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 as a guitar player. I'd be the first to admit that much of the technique I use these days has come about as a direct result of frustration due to my lack of picking ability and the inevitable 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. Both favour a very relaxed right hand with very little movement meaning that I could pull of complex 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 unique approach to articulating my lines. In this tutorial I'd like to take you through my thought process 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 try your own ideas and approaches on. I recommend that, rather then learn the lines in this tutorial note for note, you should take the concepts and fragments of ideas, applying them to 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 my timing 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, placing accents where I wanted them to be. I seemed to be producing a triplet sound regardless of which subdivision I actually wanted to play. For me, legato players seemed to fall into two categories: 1 Those who use legato technique to play fast and fluid lines that seem to cross over the time. Many different, subtle subdivisions are used in the same line as notes are crammed into each beat more as a textural device than playing a specific subdivision of the bar. Speed is more the issue than time feel and lines tend to be very scalar/pattern based in nature. John Petrucci and Joe Satriani style legato seemed to come from this catagory for me. 2 Those who play more solid, 'in time' legato, using specific subdivisions of the beat with great authority and are fully in control of note groupings and accents within the technique. Lines tend to be more sophisticated and arpeggio/scale based with Copyright www.tomquayle.co.uk 2012
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chromatic passing tones and stick more solidly to 8th note and 16th note subdivisions. This approach has the authority of picked lines but with the inherently smoother sounds given by hammer ons and pull offs. Players such as Allan Holdsworth and Brett Garsed are proponents of this school of playing. Both approaches are very valid ways to approach the technique but it was always the second method that appealed to me the most. As Allan Holdsworth is known to say, the technique offers a more ‘horn-like’ sound and smoothness than picking but the same level of rhythmic control. As I mentioned earlier, one of the problems I faced when I started to work on this style of playing was caused by the way I was visualizing my scales. I saw everything using the 3 note per string (3nps) system. Any system that groups scales in fingering patterns such as this will lend itself best to being played in the rhythmic subdivision that matches the number of notes per string. In other words if you play 3nps you’ll usually create a triplet feel 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 place accents where you want them becomes less conscious and more sub-conscious. The problem is further compounded by the likelihood that the first note on each new string is likely 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 8th or 16th notes it requires a great deal of control to keep these in time and feel/perform the accents in the correct place. Unlike picking, a lot of left hand control is required to get these accents feeling good. The same rings true when trying to play pentatonic scales 2nps and perform triplets or groups of 3 using legato. You’ll quickly find that feeling and performing the correct groupings is tricky when the scale shapes 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 16th notes on 3nps scales was two fold. Firstly I slowed everything down a great deal, giving my fingers and brain a chance to be fully in control of what I was doing. This way I could really focus on mapping out both aurally and physically what the 16th note groupings felt like. The second element was to iron out any discrepancies in my right hand where I was placing accents in the wrong place. This usually occurred when changing strings as the first note on each string was performed using the pick, giving a much stronger attack than a hammer on or pull off. Again I slowed everything right down and worked on reducing the pick attack to become closer dynamically to my legato notes. This is where the hybrid picking came in as I quickly found that using my middle finger on the right hand to pick the first note on each new string gave me results much closer to a hammered note. The hybrid picking has since expanded 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 trying not to speed anything up at all. I am firmly of the belief that if you practice slowly enough for long enough, the muscles and brain learn the required motor skills in a sub-conscious way and the technique becomes ‘easy’ for you. At this point your creativity takes over and the technique has become part of your repertoire. One thing I have found is that once the technique 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 is ready and one day you’ll find yourself using it as naturally as you do with driving, riding a Copyright www.tomquayle.co.uk 2012
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bike or cleaning your teeth! Patience and dedicated practice is the key to success. But then you knew that already! Another hugely important aspect of playing legato is to develop a feel for how 16th note lines (and triplet based lines for that matter) feel under the fingers when we’re not just running scales or exercises. I really like to emphasize to my students an exploratory approach to the fretboard where you play slowly and let the left hand go where it wants within the diatonic framework of the key that you’re in. Try starting off playing constant 8th notes at a very slow tempo attempting to keep a line going no matter what happens. This is a challenge unto itself and requires a lot of concentration and prepared fretboard knowledge. There is no substitute for simply learning your scales all over the fretboard and no magic to this – it simply takes time and must be done in order to improvise freely. Try to think ahead as much as you can and visualize where your line is going a few notes in advance. As you get better at this you’ll be able to target notes well in advance of actually arriving at them. Think about changing direction as often as possible and moving around the 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 avoid repetition as much as possible. Within the video and accompanying lines PDF I’ve provided you with a series of 16th note lines if you struggle to make your own. They’re relatively simple and should be seen as a starting point from which you can create your own with the eventual aim of being able to improvise in the same manner. Using a difficult technique improvisationally is often much harder than using the same technique on lines that are learnt or written. A LOT of practice is required to make a technique freely available to you in an improvised context. After much practice this will become a great deal easier and you’ll be able to find and visualize lines much more quickly. Now try the same exercise with 16th notes. Once you feel comfortable move on and tackle triplet groupings. You can take the same 16th note lines and play them as triplets. You’ll find the lines feel completely different to play requiring a different level of control as far as the legato technique goes. Your accents must fall in different places and you must feel the lines in triplet groupings, controlling those groupings with the left hand as well as the right. Finally for this lesson, let me provide you with some technical tips that will hopefully improve 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 your second finger. This will allow the best support for the fingers and the largest stretch for your legato playing. 2 – Try not to move the palm of the hand whilst performing hammer-ons and especially pull offs. The hand can move up and down in relation to which string you’re playing but the palm should not move in any way that changes the angle of the fingers in relation to the neck. This means that there is consistency for the left hand and the muscles in the hand can 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 relaxed and use small movements in order to maintain speed and stamina. This is especially true when using all 4 fingers on one string or when performing big stretches or complex lines. Copyright www.tomquayle.co.uk 2012
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4 – Use the pick lightly or the middle finger of the right hand. In order to prevent unwanted accents during your lines you need a great deal of control over your pick dynamics. The pick is, by it’s nature, a louder sound than a hammer or pull off. You need to reduce your pick attack or use a softer picking surface such as the skin of your middle finger in order to prevent these unwanted accents. 5 – Use the very tips of your fingers. I like the analogy of a Ballet Dancer going on point. In other words going onto the very tips of their toes. As a legato player you should get used to using the very tips of your fingers below the nail as this provides a much more accurate and controllable surface than the flat part of the finger tip. It’s surface area is less and therefore provides a greater degree of accuracy and tone than any other part of the fingertip surface. Good luck with your legato endeavors. I wish you all the best developing your technique and look forward to hearing the results and look forward to seeing you in part 2! All the best, Tom
Copyright www.tomquayle.co.uk 2012
