If you have heard players like Joe Satriani or Alan Holdsworth, then you have witnessed truly breathtaking legato technique (better known as hammer-os and pull-offs). Having good legato technique will help balance out your picking technique. When you want that aggressive, in-your-face sound, then stick to your picking technique, but if you want to play smooth, and fluidly, then legato technique is what you want.

In this exercise, we will be playing a simple repeating pattern using hammer-ons and pull-offs. It is about as basic as it gets as far as legato goes.

Here we see the familiar area of the fretboard which many of my exercises fall in (I will be sure to move my next set of exercises around more!).

Play this one til your fingers are numb and fatigued. You'll see what I mean. You'll reach a point where you just can't move your fingers anymore!

This exercise is a little more challenging than the previous one. This time we are moving across 3 strings. This one will help build more endurance in your fretboard hand.

Here we see the layout of the notes in this exercise. No crazy stretching or anything here!

Just like with the previous exercise, play this one over and over til you get to the point where you just can't move your fingers anymore! And also, try playing this one with just the left hand. Don't pick a single note. To do this cleanly, take your pick hand, reach over your fretboard hand, and encircle your fingers around the strings (some where between first and 10th fret), so that you mute them. Then just let your fretboard fingers go to work. You can play amazingly fluid sounding legato lines this way.

This exercise is similar to the previous one. This time we are complicating matters by throwing in the alternating E and D notes on the E and B string, respectively (i.e. notes 6 and 7 in the exercise), which disrupt the legato motion. This is a very common type of riff when it comes to legato.

We have pretty much the same fretboard layout as we had in exercise 2.

Make sure that you make smooth transitions between the picked notes and the hammer-ons and pull-offs. That's all I have to say about this one. Get to it!

Sometimes, you want to traverse a wide range of notes while just sticking with a string or two. To do that with fluid sounding legato technique, you need to throw in some slides so you can cover the distance. This exercise will teach you to do just that.

This diagram shows the range along the fretboard that your fingers will be covering in this exercise.

There are a variety of ways you can play this. You can do the slides with the first finger, the 4th finger, or both. Don't pay too much attention to how I wrote the Tab. Just get your fingers moving around til you get into a groove that works for you.

Now let's apply legato technique to a scale. The example here uses the A Major.

Nothing unfamiliar here - the good old Major scale shape at the A position.

This exercise wraps up the legato exercises. This is just a nice way to practice your scales. What I do is go through each mode one after the other using this pattern. If you can make it through all 7 modes without finger fatigue, then you are progressing nicely with your legato technique!

My ears have a radar when it comes to great sounding techniques. I'll never forget when I heard a certain riff to Joe Satriani's The Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing. The riff occurs at 1:32. It had such a smooth sound and it wasn't obvious to me how he was executing the riff. I later learned that he played the part entirely with the frethand, hammering on across strings while reaching behind with his pick hand to muffle the strings. This expanded my view of legato (i.e. hammer ons and pull offs) and is a technique that I sometimes use in my own music.

In my song Worlds In A Blade Of Grass (you can hear it in my playlist), I use this legato technique in a riff leading up to the outro section.

Above is the tab for this riff. I am not exatly a tabbing master, and so while the notes are pretty much note for note, the timing does not correspond to the recording. In any case, this exercise is not meant to be a note-for-note playback of a riff - the point to take away is that this particular legato technique can be used in a variety of ways to come up with great sounding riffs in your own music.

Later,

Brian