Building Your Arsenal: Combining Articulation Techniques

Hello again. Today we're going to continue learning how to develop our own unique playing style.

As a teacher, I think it is important to structure practice so that it progresses over time. That said, we're going to expand upon the ideas presented in the previous article now and give you somewhere to progress. I would recommend using the strategies presented in the previous lesson to assimilate a few techniques before trying to combine them with other techniques. You will get more out of this if you are already pretty comfortable with a couple ideas on their own rather than trying to juggle two foreign concepts at once.

Now then, once you've assimilated some techniques, you may want to take your mastery of them to the next level by learning how to combine them to form some interesting sounds. We will take the same approach as we did in the previous lesson -- improvise over a chord progression or jam track, but limit ourselves to a single articulation technique, i.e. slides, string bending, tapping, etc. You don't have to go until you hit the wall like the last lesson - instead, go until you're "warm," and you have your phrases flowing smoothly. As I previously mentioned, you should have some proficiency with this technique already from using the methods in the previous lesson.

Once you've warmed up your first technique, repeat this process with your next one. I'd recommend improvising with each technique exclusively for ten minutes per technique before proceeding to the next step.

Now that you've got both techniques warmed up and under your fingers, it's time to practice combining them. Continue to improvise over your jam track, this time trying to use both techniques in succession and in combination. Don't worry, I will elaborate.

Let's say for example that I was trying to combine slides and string bending. I would practice going back and forth between them in my phrasing (in succession) and then I would combine them, perhaps by sliding into a note up in the higher register and bending it up a full step or more in one fluid motion. I could also try to bend a note, then slide that bent note up to hit other notes within the key I'm playing in. These ideas are pretty prevalent in blues and rock.

Let's change techniques for a moment -- instead, we'll combine tapping and string bending. In this scenario, you could practice bending a note up, holding the bend, and then tapping other notes and pulling off to the still bent note, a very EVH kind of idea. You could hammer on to a note with your right hand, then use your left hand to apply vibrato to the note or bend the string up. Bend a note, tap a note above it, then release the bend and then pull-off from the tapped note and you can get some cool licks that sound almost like a pedal steel.

These examples should give you the gist of what we're doing here as well as some material to play around with, but remember -- I want you to come up with your own ideas. After all, our goal is to hit "the wall," or the point where you exhaust your musical vocabulary and must reach deeper into your brain to find things to play. The only difference is that this time, we have two ideas to work with and try to combine in different ways versus just a single idea to work with. The end result is still the same; we have added another tool (or two) to our belt and effectively increased our range of expression.

Please, if you have any questions or feedback, feel free to post a comment or email me at onelightminute@gmail.com.

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