Lead Guitar Practice Summary #6

Lead Guitar Practice Summary #6 video:

 

 

https://youtu.be/Rk9Y_8BtbFM

In this week’s lead guitar practice, I focused on learning a technique called legato. In music, legato is a playing form defined by its smooth, continuous flow, without breaks between notes. On the lead guitar, there are two types of legato: hammer-ons and pull-offs. A hammer-on is the action of placing a finger on a higher fret of the guitar after a note on that string is picked – without picking the second note, the note will still ring out. A pull-off is taking a finger off of the string after it is picked, and pulling the string simultaneously so as to let the note below it ring out. Hammer-ons and pull-offs are both techniques that allow the right picking hand to do less work while playing more notes with the left hand.

I found hammer-ons to be a bit easier to learn than pull-offs, although I could still improve on both techniques. Pull-offs are challenging because a finger on the left-hand has to actually pull the string for it to ring out, which is quite hard to do. To practice these two techniques further, I could continue doing exercises while increasing the tempo, or I could incorporate them into song tabs or longer exercises.

Two references that I used in my practice this week were:

Legato – Wikipedia