Another month has gone by and we've had enough time to perfect the exercises we presented, especially the one developed for the major scale across the neck of the guitar. I insist on this because it would be good to have learned the previous chapter's lesson. Today's is an exercise for getting to know the major scale laid out across the neck. It isn't a technical exercise (as we pointed out in the previous chapter), so it's just about memorizing the notes in order to learn the scale across the neck.
You only need to go over this type of exercise in your free time, just like the other major scale across the neck that we covered in the previous chapter. You have to memorize it little by little, because the point is to be able to use it intuitively later on when playing a solo or a melody. We'll no longer think about the scale in order to play; what drives us now is the freedom of playing that comes after practicing it.
- Developing Your Technique I
- Developing Your Technique II
- Developing Your Technique III
- Developing Your Technique IV
Now we have to get ready for an exercise in which the pick isn't always necessary and where there will be quite a few legato passages. To do so, we'll first practice a preview of the exercise itself. I'm not going to write out this preparation for the legato exercise in notation, just explain how to do it, since you can choose for yourself:
Take any scale you know, whether chromatic or three notes per string (you already have examples in the previous chapter), and pick only once, using the fingers of your fretting hand to produce the sound of the following notes. Be careful here, because each note is one finger; I mention this so you don't create a "slide" effect by sliding one finger to the next note, but play one finger per note. Of course, whenever you change strings you'll pick once to sound the first note and then slur the rest. Practice this model a little and then we'll go straight to the proposed exercise.
Now we have the main idea; let's study the second exercise we had planned to present. In this exercise we're going to play the C Major Scale with the twist of not always having to use the pick and, therefore, the alternate picking motion. Several of the notes will be slurred, which in the long run will translate into comfort and also, perhaps, a less aggressive sound. Remember that these exercises can be played with or without distortion (overdrive), although the latter would be advisable, since you'll notice that, by depending more on the effort of your fretting hand (in my case the left hand), the sound won't be as aggressive as in the previous exercises; instead you'll give it a "softer and more flexible sound, to my taste."
If you play it with little or no overdrive, it would be good to use some kind of compressor to get a more even sound. In both of these sound scenarios (especially the first, playing with distortion), getting a good level of harmonics using your amp's mid controls, or the EQ you use, can greatly benefit your playing of the exercises. In guitar terminology, slurs of this kind are also called Hammer-Ons when ascending, or Pull-Offs when descending. To ascend, after picking, you'll play the next slurred note with the corresponding finger and without picking; that is, getting the full sound of the note solely by pressing your finger against the neck (Hammer-On). To do it descending (Pull-Off), you pick the note; the next one, since it's slurred (and therefore you already have it prepared), will sound when you pull your finger off the string, and that's precisely the note the Pull-Off corresponds to.
The bracket symbol you'll see in the notation means a downstroke of the pick (or picking hand), and the one shaped like an arrow or open triangle is an upstroke. This exercise is easy to understand and play, so it shouldn't take you too long, but it is a preparation for the one I'll present next, which is much more difficult.
As you'll see, the exercise is built on the C major scale, so we have one more position of this scale that will be valid for our study.
Now let's move on to another one. This one is going to be quite difficult, so be very patient, since it's going to be the key exercise of this article and the only one (which, as you'll see, is no small thing). It's essential, more than ever, that you practice it little by little with the metronome at a slow tempo, and, as you know, you'll gradually speed it up. As you'll see, you have all the picking indications (as in the previous exercise). I advise you to practice it carefully bar by bar. For example, once you've managed to play the first bar well, repeat it again together with the next one you're going to study. (If you're on bar number five, the previous bars should always be studied and repeated too.) This isn't an exercise where the patterns repeat in the same way; that is, it doesn't always use the same types of finger and pick movements. That's where all its difficulty lies, but also its extraordinary versatility.
Once you manage to play it, you can check the effect of playing it faster. On the ISP Música website you'll see, in the mp3 demo over a keyboard backing (a Dm7 chord), that it's a technique used by many more guitarists than you might think, and it's overwhelming when you speed it up.
Once again we make ourselves memorize a series of fairly complicated notes and pick movements (but always within your reach, especially at this stage). It remains to point out that the scale we've used is D Dorian and therefore another extension of the major mode, in this case the second degree. So we'd still be in the key of C Major again; one more extension to add to our collection of scales in this key.
Finally, I'm going to present some exercises to continue with alternate picking and three notes per string. They're very easy to remember, since they involve the combining ability of the fingers of your fretting hand.
I insist that the key exercise is the previous one (figure 3), so you can take as much time as you need for the ones that follow. They don't contain a specific scale either (or at least not one prepared on purpose), since they're about combining different fingers on different strings in different ways. I'm not going to present them in notation because, as you'll see, they're very understandable and simple the way I'm going to present them in the following
TABLE:
/n87_05.jpg" border=0> (table under review)
First choose the fret where you're going to work, for example the fifth. On each string, and with the fingers indicated by the numbers, play the exercise ascending and descending; that is, start the first exercise on the sixth string, continue with the fifth and so on, and then descending. Do one exercise at a time until you play them correctly; you don't need to reach an extreme speed, but rather to fully understand the finger combination each one contains. Once you've finished each of the exercises separately, play them all in a row in order: Exercises 1, 2, 3 and 4 completely linked together.
We now have a good variety of exercises in this chapter, so I'll leave you with all of them so you can study them calmly. See you in the next installment, where we'll have more exercises with Hammer-On, Pull-Off and picking techniques, which I can tell you in advance will be very difficult, but within your reach. We're also going to start other kinds of exercises involving the fingers of the right hand. That way we'll keep perfecting the technique chart I promised to make at the beginning of this series of articles, which will soon be completed and at your disposal. So you know: don't miss it, and remember that without effort there are no results. See you in the next installment.
