Finally able to practice again! No sequences yet in this one, just 1/4, 1/8th and 1/16th notes at 140 bpm running through C-major, position 12 a few times. Constant volume is obviously still a difficulty for me. Ok, please open fire...

Damon - sounds good! If I may say, it seems to me, at the 1/4 speed, I can hear a consistent weakness in the pinky hammer-on on the G and B strings, but only when you're ascending the scale. It sounds strong descending, so I wonder if it's connected to the way your hand is repositioning itself as it moves from the D to the G string? Maybe I'm imagining it, but that's what I thought I heard.

I thought the 1/8th notes sounded smoother, but I felt like the clarity was lacking a little when you went to the 1/16 notes. Maybe this is still just a touch too fast?

http://youtu.be/F7QL8xIML_U here's my second day of practicing this at 120 bpm. feedback would be appreciated

Cliff, thanks & nice observations. I tried 1/4 notes again this morning and I think yesterday I may have just not been concentrating at the slow speed. I think I may have just been landing poorly with my pinky causing terrible intonation. Will surely keep an ear out for that. Hopefully I redeemed myself a bit with 1/8th notes. And yes, 1/16th notes at 140 using legato is me trying to push through to the next level. I still need to pick to make a speed like that sound clear. But yeah, as I may have mentioned this technique is coming quite slowly for me as I'm finding it difficult with my weakling fretting hand :)

Ashan, one thing that I think you should definitely do when descending is to move all of your fingers down to the lower string at the same time. To me it look like you missed the pinky pull-off note fairly often when descending.

When playing quarter notes at a given tempo, I find myself wanting to play around with dynamics too. First, I find myself wanting to try to remove any detection of accents at all; meaning have each note sounding at the same volume instead of accents every X beats (you appear to have accents on every 3rd note, which I think everyone starts out doing). Second, I find myself wanting to purposely accent the first note of an array of groupings (e.g. every 4th note, every 5th note, etc.) like one may want to do when they want the timing to pop out to the listener. To make this easier, you could play around with different metronome settings to have the click sound on the 1. Hopefully I'm not out-of-line suggesting this though because Pebber clear advises us above to play quarter notes for a long time...

And of course, take this with a grain of salt; you saw where I'm at myself a few posts high.

thanks dlraben. i definitely suck at everything descending. i'll pay more attention to what i'm doing and post a video in a few days :-) this is just after 2days of 30 minute practice sessions im going to make it longer from tomorrow.

Quote: ashan wrote in post #78

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http://youtu.be/F7QL8xIML_U here's my second day of practicing this at 120 bpm. feedback would be appreciated

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thanks man. have a few vids lined up. i'll upload tomorrow

Here's where I'm at today with legato (1/4 notes at 140bpm). Let me know how badly I suck ;)

rock on cliff...this is light years ahead of your original legato vid post! Your are playing legato in a way that few people ever really seem to get...You are sowwing the seeds right now for monster technique and fantastic dynamics down the line (-:

Quote: Cliff wrote in post #83

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Here's where I'm at today with legato (1/4 notes at 140bpm). Let me know how badly I suck ;)

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Thanks Nick for the positive comments - much appreciated.
And thanks very much Ursin for the feedback too. I'll bear this in mind. When doing the ladder exercises, should I be trying to keep the non-fretting fingers curved and close to the fretboard too? What I'm trying to say is, if the ladder using say the first and pinky, do I try and keep good control over the 2nd and 3rd fingers at the same time?

Yeah, you always want to keep the fingers in tight and as close to the strings as possible. Here ya go. Do this. Takes a long time. Took me about 2 years of 8hr a day practicing to really get it down. Give it some time.

I just want to add that since I started trilling( about 1 week now) I have already seen a 12.5 % increase in my speed. When I trill I use an acoustic and try to keep my fingers as close to the fretboard as possible, basically I try to produce the most amount of sound while trying to keep the movement as subtle as possible. I started on the high E string, but since then I switched to the other 5 strings, because my goal is NOT to mute any of the other strings....you definitely can't be liberal with your pulloffs if you want to avoid muting for legato.

The reason I made this post is for critique purposes only.

Thanks Ursin (and Pebber!) for the vid. I'll set aside some time over the weekend to give it my full attention.

One (probably stupid) question. I usually practice trills and ladders last thing at night, after everyone has gone to bed and I have to switch my amp off. What I've recently noticed though is that if I run through a few scales after these exercises, my left-hand is way better than when I start the evening, where I'm working with legato, sweeps etc etc. So I'm guessing ideally I would be doing the trills and ladders as warmup rather than as the last thing of the night?

Yes Cliff (but NOT a dumb question at all!) this stuff is part of my warm up every day! left hand basics 101 to fire up left hand....Module 1 stuff with scalpal and then with sarod to fire up the right hand...using this stuff to get warmed up is huge...but maybe thats why it takes me the first 4-5 hours every day before I can play much of ANYTHING...lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTI2s4svE2s ..........This is where I pretty much learned everything I know about legato...this dude knows his stuff!

Yep, he seems to have the technique nailed :).

Watched Pebber's ladder exercise vid. I'd watched a few months ago, but I guess I'd forgotten some of it. Up until this weekend, I'd been practicing ladders without any of those stretches. The inclusion of those and keeping the fingers curled has made this *much* more challenging.

Hey all,

Here's an update of where I'm at. I practiced one note a beat for a month, going up to 200bpm. For the last two weeks I've been working on 1 note-per beat at 180bpm, 2 at 90, 3 at 60, then 4, 5 and 6 at 45bpm. In the vid I only show that last three of these:



This is the first time I've recorded myself since my last post here. I must say, I thought I was making better progress than this suggests. A few bad things I here:

Fluffed notes and badly emphasized notes
Overall timing is pretty damned loose
As I shift from going up to down the scale, it tends to throw my accents off completely - I lose the beat

Anyway, all feedback and advice appreciated.

Your tone is clear and I don't hear unwanted string noise. You're hitting only the notes that you want to ring and that's great. Here is a few things I do when practicing in general.

I usually like to practice standing up and also in front of a mirror. I play a scale shape for a few times and continue playing the shape with my eyes closed until I mess it up or until I am done practicing that shape. I think closing my eyes helps me in concentrating and viewing the shape in my mind as I play. I usually practice a shape for 5-6 minutes and the goal is to play the shape for longer duration without making mistake and merge the shape with adjacent shape(if possible) with eyes closed.

Thanks Diego :). You're right, I have made progress in terms of tone and removing unwanted noise, so that's something.

Another guy recommended practicing with eyes closed as well. I must admit I keep forgetting this advice, but it's something I'd like to try more of. My new guitar doesn't have fret markers, so now I need a better mental idea of the shapes anyway.

Thanks for the sage advice.

This is exposing a long-standing weakness of mine, which is a tendency to emphasise a note because of some property of how it's physically played in a phrase, rather than because it's on the beat. Once I do this, my timing goes, so this is really good practice for me. This last week, I've found that listening more carefully to the metronome helps :).

I figured out that I was practicing tills/legato starting only from my first finger. I came up with some patterns and started practicing trills starting from the second, third and fourth fingers. This video is @ 250 bps and 2 notes per beat. I am doing 2-1-3-1 finger pattern. I use a lot of gain and try to mute unwanted string noise. My playing is always noisy on the higher frets.

I feel that my pinky is tighter, curved and closer to the strings. I am not sure if my picking hand is getting straight yet. What do you think Ursin?

Yo diego this is looking good to me. Very solid work. Keep up with these trills daily. I continue to come across lessons and magazine articles that mention to "do these trill exercises for 15 minutes a day."

That is shit.

You should be doing trills at least an hour a day I would say. There are so many permutations that you could never exhaust them all and also, it's a great warm-up.

Your fret hand fingers look really good! The wrist is still very bent. If this is comfortable to you, that is ok but it may lead to carpal tunnel syndrome down the road. You might try pulling the neck closer to your head.

Your pick hand is looking good. When you are doing these trill exercises you might try this: When ascending low to high use alternate picking and when descending use sweep picking. Or, when ascending use alternate and when descending don't use the pick at all.

Also, learn some scales and trill those.

Solid work. Keep pushing forward.