Legato Exercises for Beginners

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Instructor: Lucas Fowler Level: Beginner Topic: Exercises Style: Any Style

Excerpt: Hey everyone! This month we're going to discuss some very basic exercises to strengthen your legato technique. These will help build muscle memory that you can apply to scales and muscial playing as well as increase your stamina and the length of time you can play this way without fatigue. This first exercise deals with a half step, whole step pattern usin...

Media Length: 5:20

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Instructor: Lucas Fowler Level: Beginner Topic: Exercises Style: Any Style

Excerpt: Following the previous exercise, this is essentially the same thing but using the whole step, half step combination with fingers 1, 3 and 4. Remember to start slow and only increase the speed once you can do the exercise smoothly at the slower tempo.

Media Length: 1:20

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Instructor: Lucas Fowler Level: Beginner Topic: Exercises Style: Any Style

Excerpt: Now we're going to practice the last "shape" in the form of fingers 1, 2 and 4, but with whole step, whole step intervals. As with the previous drills, start slow and build up the tempo only when you feel the lick feels and sounds smooth. Once you feel comfortable with all three of these shapes, we can move on to the next section where we will talk about p...

Media Length: 2:26

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Instructor: Lucas Fowler Level: Beginner Topic: Exercises Style: Any Style

Excerpt: Now that you feel comfortable with the "shapes" from the first three examples, we're going to apply them across all six strings using a pattern of two steps forward, one step back. These will build up stamina in your fretting hand so that you can continue to play using this technique over long passages without losing the legato sound or tiring out. As alway...

Media Length: 4:04

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Instructor: Lucas Fowler Level: Beginner Topic: Exercises Style: Any Style

Excerpt: For the last section, we're going to add to the pattern idea used in the last figure. Now instead of doing two steps forward, one step back, we are going to do three steps forward, one step back. This will continue to build your stamina and this pattern in particular will become very handy later on when you apply it to scale modes to emphasize a part in a le...

Media Length: 1:32