This month RGT’s Simon Barnard is here to help you improve your legato playing with some smooth, slinky and slippery licks.

Joe Satriani is one of the smoothest players around

The Italian word legato roughly translates as ‘smooth’. For guitarists, the legato techniques involves a series of slurs using hammer-ons, pull-offs and slides to create a smooth sound, void of a busy pick attack. This legato techniques works well in many genres, but particularly those where overdrive and distortion are used, which helps create sustained notes, which in turn help with fluidity and even out dynamics. The legato technique can be used alongside two-handed tapping, to add further reach and opportunities. Make sure that you check out next month’s column where I will taking at look at the two-handed tapping technique.

Legato, due to its very nature, offers a different sound compared to other techniques such as alternate picking. It can be challenging at first because the fretting hand has a lot of responsibility. It calls for greater fretting accuracy in the first instance because notes have to fretted with more precision, striking the note with enough force while making sure that adjacent strings are muted sufficiently. Coordinating the fretting and picking hand can also be a struggle at first, but with practice it becomes so much easier and very satisfying.