What's in your bag of tricks?!

[carlosguardia]

Care to share what each one of you have inside your bag of tricks?!!

Every guitar player, in the never-ending learning process comes across some "cool tricks" be it, learning to do two hand tapping, sweep picking, some weird scale that sounds awesome or whatever. Why don't we share some tricks?!! Let me start... A while ago I learned the "Japanese pentatonic" scale which I consider to be incredibly cool. The scale, in the tone of Am goes:
A, B,C, E,F. Skipping the perfect 4th and minor 7th. Try this one out, it's very cool and given the fretting of it, it gives your improvisation a fresh new air... Hope you find this one useful. Any other cool tricks?!

Carlos

 

[carlosguardia]

OHHHH and I just remembered another cool one... I call this one the Randy Rhoads Harmonic Minor... for practical purposes I'll put it in the tone of Am. It basically consists of playing all the 1/2 tones one after the other with some legatto... or not... B/C, E/F, G#/A and back to B/C etc... Randy used this one on Revelations and it just sounds wicked!!! Try that one!!

Carlos

 

[Treeline]

"double" hammer on / pull off

Here's a neat, deceptively simple one that acoustic players use to spice up hammer ons. You hear it in Celtic music quite a lot, but it has great application in any kind of aggressive or emotive fingerstyle or flatpicking lead work.

The notion of a "hammer on" is that the act of fretting and plucking the string occurs simultaneously and using only the left hand. Basically, hit the string hard enough with a fretting finger in the process of fretting and it will ring at the tone of the chosen fret. A "pull off" is the reverse - you ring the string at open when you release it from a fretted position, again using only the fretting finger to do it. Basic stuff.

This variation is simply that you pluck the sting (usually open) with the pick or right hand finger, then immediately hammer on at the note you want to hit, pull off instantly (making the string ring open again) and then slide the fretting finger again to that same fret to complete the note or in the alternative, to whatever note you wish to be the primary tone of the exercise. (Might be an (e) fretted on the second string, for instance).

It's a highly percussive technique that tends to break a whole note into bits - like 1/128th or something.

So - to hit a "g" in an acoustic lead passage, let the string ring open (e), do the instant hammer on / pull off thing at (g) which will take you to (g) for an instant and then will ring at (e), and then slide (aggressively) to (g) with a fretting finger.

You've hit your "primary note" but given people musical whiplash in the process. Cool stuff.

 

[JR#97]

Excellent explaination, Treeline! I use that all the time in my fingerstyle stuff.

Most of my tricks are acoustic anymore. Using alternate and unusual tunings is something I do a lot of. Right now, I'm using a tuning that works great for emulating banjo and bluegrass licks. DADDAD. The right hand picking technique is similar to banjo rolls, but I use 4 fingers instead of 3 which takes off a lot of the thumb workload.

Another trick I use a lot is the 2 string hammer on pull-off. It looks something like this:

E----------------7-p-0-----------
B-------4-h-5---------------------
G-----------------------------------

On the acoustic, I use fingers. On the electric, I alternate pick. You can generate some good speedy sounding licks without busting a "nut" doing it.

Another great tricks is incorporating open strings in your runs.