Is Legato Lazy?

Imagining this time back, I’m sure we probably struggled with Paul’s Shred Lick using both Legato and Picking technique. But between fellow guitar students, it was always somehow assumed that not being able to pick everything was a form of technical weakness and Legato was somehow “cheating”… please bear in mind we were obsessed with virtuoso guitar players at the time, we had only just turned 18.

Some years later I would develop a taste for Legato players such as Brett Garsed, Allan Holdsworth, Alan Hinds, Tom Quayle, Alan Murphy etc. It was around this time that I started to mature and understand that Legato not only was a way of controlling your tone and articulating notes, but also a very tricky technique to master if you want to play musically.

It's worth mentioning at this point that both Picking & Legato are simply ways of articulating notes, they aren’t genre specific. They are names of techniques. Picking gives us a staccato sound, we can give the notes a certain attack. Legato simply means to play connected and smoothly. Guitarists find it's easiest to get this ‘Legato’ sound by using Hammer On’s and Pull Off’s on the fretting hand, using minimal picking, sometimes hybrid picking for the soft attack of the picking hand fingertips. So it makes sense for any serious guitar player to have a level of competence with both techniques. What does that mean?

If we’re playing music we want to be able to articulate melodies, melodies are built from notes happening in a rhythmic time frame. So we need to be able to control the dynamics, attack, tone and timing of the notes we’re expressing. We also want to gain as much freedom as possible with these techniques, so we’re not stuck with a certain ‘way of playing’. Of course this is just an ideal, it's impossible to be totally free in any one technique or system due to how the Guitar is laid out. But to develop these techniques so we’re confident is key.

Heading back to 18 year old shred head me. At the time I was playing a lot of 3 note per string patterns, these patterns would be laid out quite symmetrically on the fretboard, it was kinda easy to hammer up the patterns ascending with legato. But descending with pull offs or hammer ons from nowhere felt impossible. I didn’t care much for it at the time, because I was on my 1000^th viewing of Paul Gilbert’s REH instructional video “Intense Rock 1”. I had missed some of the nuances of Paul’s playing, he would often combine legato and picking in his fast playing. I was so dogmatic around picking at the time, I neglected Legato. In reality I was fearful of legato. With picking, I could aim towards a rhythm and play it. But with legato you need a far more sensitive level of control, each note on the fretting hand has to be accounted for, every hammer and pull has to be in time for it to really work. It's easy to rush the hammers, it's common to get caught up in the pull offs and as for changing strings during a line, keeping the ‘legato’ sound consistent with the occasional pick stroke, keeping other strings muted and keeping the timing in pocket. It’s a lot to practice!

What I noticed when I started practicing Legato and taking lessons from players such as Tom Quayle is that my timing started to improve on the instrument and it started to effect my picking. My fretting hand was more confident on the fretboard, therefore when picking, it was feeding the picking hand better information. Leading to a firmer more consistent playing. It effected my tone, I could play other guitars with more confidence, I was able to play melodies and runs in a multitude of ways. It gave me more options. (I am saying all of this like its perfect, I’m far from it! This is only when I’ve been practicing!)

There are some great lessons at LickLibrary.com on Legato, I’d recommend Tom Quayle's Legato for Absolute Beginners (its not quite for absolute beginners!) but if you want to take a look at the foundations that will serve your Legato playing for life, it’s a great course to check out!