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Jenna Jameson Jackson Guitars

Legato Passages from Hell!!!

Legato technique is a very expressive and passionate technique that can add
flair and inspiration to your music. The use of legato can be applied to great
effect in any style of music. This versatility and expression is what makes it
useful to us as musicians.

Simple Legato:

Simple legato techniques cover things such as hammer-ons and pull-offs at
relatively low speed with short stretches. An example of a simple legato phrase
would be:

legato 1

Accuracy and reduction of excess string noise is the key here.

Find more exercises that will help your simple legato playing and master this
technique. You will then have a firm foundation from which to build more
advanced techniques.

More Legato:

Two-hand tapping is a legato technique that can add a quick succession of legato
notes into a section of a song and add musical tension.

legato 2

You must aim to make the tapping finger sound the same as if you were fretting
the actual note.

This is an essential technique to learn if you want to master legato playing, so
spend tome getting your two-hand tapping technique up to a standard that
encompasses as much as you can find.

Advanced Legato:

A good way of increasing the speed of a passage whilst retaining fluidity is to
play the notes legato. This technique can be applied to wide stretches and runs
to great effect. You can arpeggiate chords over one string and then skip over
strings to another.

Here is an example of the way I use my legato technique in runs, this is an
extract from the solo of Last Stand © the final song on my upcoming album,
(If I can ever find the time to record it, the songs are written but I cant seem
to find any time!) Anyway here it is:

This is the opening legato section of the solo and is played at 150bpm in semi-quavers,
each of the three note legato phrases are played as triplets. You must make
sure that you use stretches and not tapping in this section.

legato 3

The only major difficulties here are the stretches and the speed of the passage.

String Skipping Legato:

You can even use string skipping ideas with this method of legato playing:

legato 4

Hope you have enjoyed this lesson, remember use these techniques in your
soloing, it will help you to master them faster. You can also combine this
technique with others, such as sweep picking! This sort of combination will be
covered in future lessons, so I look forward to creating some interesting hybrid
techniques.

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