Looking for legato guitar technique secrets to help you play fast and smooth licks that impress anyone listening?
Don't waste time strengthening your fretting hand fingers.
This is not how you build speed with legato.
There are many key concepts that help you play legato guitar licks as fast as you want.
Learn them and master them by watching this legato guitar video demonstration:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
Want to get the most out of your legato guitar technique?
Becoming an excellent guitarist who achieves greatness requires the mastery of various key skills - This applies whether you are using legato guitar technique or any other technique.
These 4 skills are mandatory for lead guitar players who want to play better solos and licks:
Mastering this skill helps you effortlessly play licks and solos across the neck.
Fretboard visualization means having an understanding of the note names for every fret AND being able to see any chord/arpeggio/scale pattern in any position across the neck.
Without this skill, you easily become lost during solos or improvisation.
This restricts you to only playing in a few positions of the fretboard because you don't know how to connect different scales together.
This harms your overall phrasing and makes your soloing less expressive.
Getting good at guitar phrasing makes expressing yourself easy to do with legato guitar technique or any technique.
Many guitar players spend hundreds of hours improving their speed, technique and scale knowledge but never work on the skill of making each note sound expressive (also known as phrasing).
It’s very difficult to play great licks and solos of your own when you don’t have excellent phrasing skills.
Mastering aural skills helps you to hear notes in your head before you even fret them - this is crucial for playing guitar solos with legato technique that flows from phrase to phrase.
Without good aural skills, you have to guess what the next note will sound without knowing what you are playing next - this makes playing great guitar solos nearly impossible.
Not only that, but it increases the chances you’ll play a wrong note or make a mistake.
Train your aural skills at least a little each day.
One simple way to do it:
Slowly play the first 4 notes of any scale, then sing the 5th note before you play it. Look for many different ways to practice this by focusing on different notes of the scale.
Mastering the application of music theory helps you to become expressive with all the musical skills you have developed.
Becoming a great guitar player requires total control over the emotional expression of your music.
Whenever you learn new music theory concepts, immediately seek ways to apply and integrate what you learned with your musical skills. The better you get at this, the faster you become a great overall musician.
One of the best ways to get better at using your guitar skills 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.”
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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…”
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... 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.”
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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."
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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."
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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 by clicking 'Start Now':