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Intervallic And Legato Guitar Licks
Intervals and Legato Guitar Licks Technique Workout
Music is a language and I think of picked notes as consonants as they have more attack, and legato as vowels as they have a smoother sound. When improvising, it is important to combine many techniques to create interest in your guitar playing.
Large intervals are difficult to pick as you will often need to jump across your guitar strings. It is essential that you practise jumping across the strings so your picking hand can sync up with your fretting hand. You can also use a pick and finger approach to jump across the strings. The pick and finger approach also gives variation in tone that will create interest in your melodic ideas.
What Does Legato Mean?
Legato means to play notes as smoothly connected as possible. This can be achieved via hammer ons, pull offs, slides, etc. When speaking, vowel sounds - A E I O U - are softer sounds and I like to think of legato sounds as vowels compared to the harder sounds of consonants - T, K, D, etc., which I think of as picked notes. A good balance of picked notes and legato will create musical interest when you play guitar.
No matter what style of music you play, you need to learn the repertoire and understand what it is you are playing. To help you understand what you are playing when learning any musical content, my weekly newsletter breaks the weekly guitar licks down for you and analyses what is going on.
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Harmonic Minor Scale Intervals Lick
The harmonic minor scale is a great sound to use over dominant 7th chords to create an eastern sound.
Although the harmonic minor scale works best when playing over the v7 chord in a minor key, it is great fun to blast some harmonic minor scale guitar licks over a static dominant 7th chord.
This lick requires you to jump across the strings and will take a bit of work to get the technique accurate if this type of guitar lick is new to you. I am using a guitar pick and finger approach for this particular lick.
A7 Legato Workout guitar lick
This guitar lick uses many hammer ons, pull offs and slides to create a flowing sound that ascends along the guitar fingerboard.
This lick is played over an A7 chord, although this particular melodic sequence will work great for any type of scale, especially the good old major and minor pentatonic scales. Be sure to experiment with this sequence!
D Major 4ths And 5ths Guitar Lick
Another melodic interval workout with this guitar lick.
Although the 4th and 5th intervals are not as wide as the previous harmonic minor scale interval lick, 4ths are difficult to play cleanly because of the left hand movement.
I love the sound of 4th intervals, although crossing the strings with one finger of your left hand and playing the notes for the desired amount of time without the notes bleeding into each other does take practice. Pentatonic scales are a great candidate for this type of 4th and 5th intervallic guitar lick.
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