Learn How To Play With Super Clean Legato Guitar Technique
To improve your legato technique on guitar, the LAST thing you should be doing is simply "looking for new exercises".
Fact is, most guitarists make this mistake and never develop great-sounding, clean legato technique.
Instead, you need to learn the approach the best gutarists use to practice this technique so you can make any legato lick sound amazing.
Watch this free legato technique video to see how this is done and quickly develop awesome legato guitar playing skills:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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4 Under-Practiced Guitar Playing Skills Needed To Achieve Musical Greatness
Becoming an excellent guitarist who achieves greatness requires the mastery of various key skills.
These 4 (frequently overlooked) skills are mandatory for guitar players who want to achieve great things in music:
Musical Skill #1. Great Fretboard Visualization Knowledge
Mastering this skill helps you effortlessly improvise in any area of the fretboard.
Fretboard visualization means having an understanding of the note names for every fret AND being able to see any chord/arpeggio/scale all over the neck. Without this skill, you easily become lost during guitar solos or improvisation.
This restricts you to only playing in a few positions of the fretboard because you don’t know how to connect them to other areas. This harms your overall phrasing and makes your soloing less interesting.
Musical Skill #2. Guitar Phrasing
Getting good at guitar phrasing makes expressing yourself in guitar solos effortless.
Many guitar players spend hundreds of hours improving their speed, technique and scale knowledge but never work on getting good with phrasing.
It’s very difficult to play great solos and improvise well when you don’t have excellent phrasing skills.
Musical Skill #3. Aural Skills
Mastering this skill helps you recognize notes in your head before you even play them. This makes it easy to express yourself while improvising.
Without good aural skills, you have to guess what the next note will sound like while playing guitar solos or improvise.
This massively limits your ability to play with excellent phrasing and increases the chances you’ll play a wrong note or make a mistake. Guitarists who lack aural skills are easy to identify during a guitar solo because they spend most of their time searching for notes that sound good rather than playing great phrases.
Musical Skill #4. Music Theory
Mastering music theory helps you understand why notes make you feel a certain emotion and how to recreate that emotion through guitar.
Becoming a great guitarist requires total control over the emotional expression of your music. When you lack a solid understanding of music theory, you don’t know the best note choices to use in order to express specific emotions during solos and improvisation.
Common Mistakes That Make Creative Guitar Playing A Struggle
It’s very hard to play guitar creatively when you make common mistakes that prevent you from expressing yourself with as much creativity as possible.
Stay away from these mistakes to avoid struggling with creativity:
1. Learning Many Techniques, Licks And Scales In Isolation
There is some value behind learning guitar playing skills in isolation from other aspects of your guitar playing. However, without learning how to integrate different skills together, your creativity massively struggles.
This is because being musically creative requires using many different skills at once (and almost never involves using skills in total isolation).
Here’s a common example: many guitarists work very hard to learn new scales, build speed and improve their technique. While doing this, they completely overlook integrating their skills together.
Doing this creates holes in your guitar playing and makes you an unbalanced player. This leads to situations such as being able to play scale patterns with tons of speed, but not being able to use scales to create musical sounding guitar solos.
2. Spending Too Much Time Practicing Guitar
You must practice guitar to become a better guitarist of course... but practicing guitar too much has the negative effect of limiting your overall life experiences.
This makes it more difficult to get the inspiration needed for creative guitar playing (because you have little inspiration to draw from). If you only spend time thinking about “guitar”, you don’t discover new things to express in music.
Get more things to express through music by taking these actions:
- Seek out ways to experience new things in your life. Focus on moving outside of your comfort zone more often by scheduling new things to try every week.
- Make it your goal to continually learn new ideas. New knowledge gives you a better understanding of the world and replenishes your mind with things to express through music.
- Play guitar with other musicians in band settings. Playing music with others forces you to think about music in a very different way than when you are alone.
3. Confusing “Musical Creativity” With “Artistic Greatness”
When you are a creative guitar player, this demonstrates a mastery of many guitar techniques and musical skills. Artistic greatness takes this to a whole new level – it’s the power to use your musical ability for expressing particular ideas/emotions.
This is similar to expressing ideas in language: first you learn the basics, then you start to develop your own ideas and utilize your mastery of language to communicate them to others.
One of the best ways to get better at using music to express yourself is to work with a guitar teacher. Here are some of the results my students got:
“When I met Tom Hess, I knew that this is the guy. Just going through the evaluation form, all the questions, different questions, and he was digging deeper and deeper into all my goals and all that stuff... and no one has ever done that with me before, so I felt right away that this is the guy.”
The level that I was at before I went to Tom for lessons was that I could play pretty fast, I could play sloppy, I didn’t know nothing about music theory, so I was kind of unbalanced, I was uneven. I was a good player technically, but I knew very little about music theory. So I wanted to even that out, and Tom has helped me, not only evening that out, but also exceeding my expectations. So now I’m playing at a level that I didn’t expect that I could play at. So that’s... I’m very happy with that.
I like lessons with Tom because of the format basically. He gives a variety of formats... not just one format, like video for example, but also pdf files and audio files that you can take with you if you’re doing something else... you have to do labor that day, laundry or whatever... then you can listen to the sessions and while... you can actually benefit when you’re not even practicing, so it’s a no brainer.
Gottfrid Norberg Waxin, Sweden
“I found Tom Hess on the net through articles, and I read quite a few of those before I went to Tom’s website. Even though I’m not a metal player at all, and Tom is obviously a metal player, I could still see that his ideas and way of teaching could really benefit me. So I pretty much signed up for online guitar lessons with Tom straight away once I’d gone through the website, and it’s just been a real eye opener with the way he teaches…”
... the integration of concepts that he’ll give you and having a really structured strategy… not just week to week lessons, but things that - you can see from one lesson to the next - really develop and continue to work on your technique and your theory and aural skills and those types of things. So I’d played a long time… 20 years before I really caught onto Tom, and I’d had a lot of lessons, and I’d taught and played but I can really see improvements in my technique, sweeping, and picking which weren’t strong parts of my playing.
I feel like Tom has a good gauge of where you’re at as a guitar player and what you need, and there just seemed to be so much more stuff in the lessons week to week than what you’d ever get in an hour or so in a one on one lesson… way more. So yeah I think that and the forum. I think, I’d pay the money just for the forum. That alone would be fine… I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. So that alone is massive!
The price for the lessons, that’s nothing... nothing. You know, I think it’s, pretty cheap to be honest. I don’t mean that in a bad way, cheap. Cheap is not a good word, but I just think it’s great value… awesome value. I mean, you know, you could pay that for one-to-one lessons and you just don’t get the same results and support of the forum and the content and the strategies.
Other teachers I’ve had have been good players, and some have become good friends too. But when I’ve started lessons with Tom I’ve got something to compare that to and a lot of it is just sort of teaching songs from week to week… a lot of the lesson will be left up to you… you’ll go to your lesson and they’ll be like what do you want to do today? At the time I said, oh do this song or that song, but with Tom you start to realize that you know, there’s more to it… the goals and you know he’s sort of more in contact with what you want to be able to do as a player, because he’s asking you the questions and then setting up the strategies, so I find that really good.
Yeah I can see more results in 18 months in a lot of areas in my playing than you know 20 years. So it’s sort of, you know, would’ve been great 20 years ago to have met Tom.
Simon Candy, Melbourne, Australia
“I've played guitar for several years and I think I've taken it as far as I could take it and I was going on the internet and found Tom, I take Breakthrough Guitar Lessons from him and I have to say it was the best thing that I've ever could have done. There is nothing better than Breakthrough Guitar Lessons with Tom.”
Tom has the innate ability to hone in on whatever problems you have and immediately fix it for you. The lessons are very goal oriented, very detailed and Tom is very approachable. I consider Tom to be a master teacher. A master teacher is someone who cares about their students, who talks to their students, who shares with their students and gets them to the place that they need to be as a guitar player. And Tom, I will tell you, does all of that and more.
Rovan Deon, Rahway, NJ, USA
You also get better in all areas of your playing faster by tracking and measuring your progress each week. My students have done this using a tool I designed especially for this:
"The Guitar Playing Accelerator has made me aware of some really key weaknesses that I didn’t know that I had."
I’ve taken music exams before. Plenty of them. And I’ve never had my knowledge tested and tracked and fed back to me in the way that the accelerator does. So I think that knowing that those weaknesses exist and where they exist is going to be very helpful in pulling those areas up to the level where they need to be.
The Guitar Playing Accelerator helps me make more progress by essentially keeping me on point. It’s very easy to practice things that I enjoy doing like many guitarists… going back to the comfort zone kind of thing. When you’ve been playing for quite a long time - I’ve been playing for about 15 years - you learn a lot of songs, you learn to improvise a bit, you can get kind of a bit complacent with your skills… quite happy with what you can do. And you think that you’ve got your practice down. I’ve had a tendency to think that in the past so the way that it’s going to help me with practicing and getting results is keeping my time focused essentially. Because I’ve got limited time to practice the guitar of course. And that’s a huge thing, getting that efficiency of time… zeroing in on what’s really going to make the difference.
I think the Guitar Playing Accelerator is worth way more than it costs. I think it’ll help you be a better player. Well no, if you use it, you WILL become a better player, because it will point out your weaknesses to you that you’re not even aware of currently… that maybe your guitar teacher wouldn’t even be able to point out. That thing is so detailed. I think the third way that it will help you is by focusing your practice time and stopping you from wasting time doing things that you can already do. It’s going to challenge you to actively solve your weak points instead of just ignoring them like most guitarists do.
Christy Bannerman, Glasgow, Scotland
"The Guitar Playing Accelerator is comprehensive, and I have to be honest, when I first used it I didn’t even know that you could test the things that it was asking you to test."
I wasn’t even aware of the ways of testing your speed, the ways of testing your picking, your arpeggio knowledge, your chord knowledge... didn’t know about it.
The Guitar Playing Accelerator helps me make more progress because it helps me to track what I’m doing... And all the different areas that it makes you track in are helping you play things really, really well. And become a professional sounding player. And not just a sloppy sounding speed demon, which is what most veteran players are at least.
My favorite thing on the Guitar Playing Accelerator is the chord inversions. And the fretboard visualization I think it’s called, which is awesome. I didn’t realize I was so weak in those areas until I did the test and I saw my kind of level scores were quite low compared to what it could be. And then I got really competitive about it and I’d go to sleep at night trying to practice my fretboard visualizations, which I'd never thought to do before, so I could get better at the Guitar Playing Accelerator for the next week when I did the test. Weird experience, but it made me a better guitar player. It means that now when I jump on the guitar, I can see the chords and my theory knowledge is not just good in theory… I actually use it on the guitar. And when I’m playing with people, it’s like you don’t need to know your theory in your head, you need to know it boom in 5 seconds and then play it in session.
Darryl Powis, London, England
Find out how to use legato guitar technique together with other areas of your playing to become an extremely creative guitarist using these guitar lessons.