Originally, I thought I could keep up with my Exercise of the Week lesson, but I just don't have the time to be doing that on a weekly basis. So here is a toned down version - the Exercise of the Month. You can expect to see quite a wide variety of exercises here that will help you in many areas of your playing.

The last couple guitar lessons have focused pretty heavily on picking technique. So I decided to mix things up a bit. In fact, with this lesson, you don't even need a pick. You will be playing a legato lick strictly with your fret hand. I find that this technique lends itself to the smoothest sounding legato possible, especially when you use you pick hand to muffle the strings behind your fret hand.

Basically, what is going on with this exercise, is you are sequencing some triad arpeggios into a nice sounding pattern. Namely, the progression goes from C Maj to D Maj to E Min. The build-up to the E Min arpeggio works well, especially when played up to tempo.

Here you see the basic shapes involved. You are probably accustomed to playing arpeggios of this sort with the sweep technique. But forget sweeping - you will be using legato to burn through these arpeggios. And it will sound far smoother than sweeping could ever sound!

The toughest part of this lick is figuring out what to do with the picking hand. Basically, you want to reach across your body and wrap it around the neck at a spot that is sufficiently far enough behind where all the action is. THis will result in a muting of the strings, which is what gives way to the incredibly smooth sound. So basically wrap your hand around the 7th fret (i.e. because at the end of the lick, you basically want to play an improvised descending run and so you want to leave yourself with some decent fretboard real estate).

Good luck!

Brian

PS - sorry, but I only recorded it at a fast tempo. It gets time consuming to record at various speeds... But that is what the MIDI is for. With a proper MIDI player, you can set the tempo to whatever you desire.