7 over 2

I think the most important quality of an improviser is the ability to play interesting rhythms. Today we are going to develop this ability by tackling a difficult rhythm, playing seven notes over two beats. The classic name for this formation is 8th note septuplets.
The original exercise is a three note scale sequence played 4 notes per beat (16th notes). Accent the notes at the start of the formation. When playing in 4 accent every fourth beat, in 7 every seventh. This will prove quite difficult, so I advise you to play along the gpx file until you hear the melodies unfolding.
Have fun with this one.

Link to gpx: http://sebastiangrosu.com/desk/7over2.gpx

Arpeggio Exercises

Here you have two very useful arpeggio exercises.
The first one is a fluency exercise designed to get arpeggios and scales under your fingers.
The second one introduces the concept of heptatonics, playing all the notes of the major scale but in a structured way. It is sometimes called triad pairs, or arpeggio pairs, because one arpeggio in the scale is played followed by the next triad in the scale (in our case Abm7 with Bbm). This kind of exercise introduces subtlety in your playing.
I strongly encourage you to try all positions and tonalities.

Arpeggios

This week I am introducing you to arpeggios.
Arpeggios are just the notes of the chord played in a row. If we extend our triad with another third we get four note chords, very popular in jazz.
So the harmonization of the major scale changes as follows:

I maj7, II min7, III min 7, IV maj7, V7(dominant), VI min7, VII m7b5

More Triads

By playing every other note in the scale we obtain 7 triads - three major, three minor and one diminished. Playing the notes in a triad simultaneously we get chords. This is called the harmonization of the major scale - we have obtained a family of chords that derive from a certain scale and thus work together.

This is the chord formula for every major scale: I major, II minor, III minor, IV major, V major, VI minor and VII diminished. In the context of four note chords we will be altering a little bit this chord formula.

Superimposing the major triad over the corresponding major chord will produce the most consonant sound possible. By playing triads from the same family - for example, instead of D major over the D major chord we could play F# min or B min - we can still achieve a consonant sound without being too obvious. The three triad families are (I, III, VI) - (II, IV) and (V, VII).

I encourage you to play with these triads and use any of them over any chord. What sounds consonant to me might not sound to you. Nevertheless, being able to hear them and being familiar with them will help you take informed decisions while improvising.

Intervals

This week's subject is intervals. By repeating an interval and combining intervals you can obtain a structured melodic sound.
Practice carefully the following exercises in all positions and all scales.

The Major Scale

Improvisation, and music in general, is based upon the idea of repetition and variation. It's underlying psychological truth is the fact that people are able to process only small chunks of information. In order for such a chunk to become interesting it has to be presented repeatedly, but each time slightly different, lest it became boring.
Thus arises the idea of structure: the blueprint of repeating and varying musical ideas.
The first important implementation of the idea of structure in music is the concept of playing subsets of the available notes. These are called scales. The most relevant scale to the western music is the major scale, characterized by the following interval formula: whole-tone, whole-tone, half-tone, whole-tone, whole-tone, whole-tone, half-tone.

Here is the scale in all positions on the fretboard:

Beginning Improvisation 1 - Warm Up

Warm up is such an important to get your hands and mind ready for practice or performance. Here is a simple exercise I came up with to shorten my warm up time but reap the benefits of warm up: strengthening fingers, stretching fingers, becoming comfortable all over the fretboard.

Stacked Arpeggios

 

Today's lesson deals with stacked arpeggios. These arpeggios are vertical structures on the fretboard that fit very well with the traditional scale shapes and can be used to reinforce their memorization. 

To get some extra mileage from this exercise, I have created a rhythmically displaced version using the concept of an eight note rest on the fourth position in every bar. Besides enabling us to hear and control the production of sequences of seven notes, this exercise also has the quality to create nice and unexpected melodic lines.

Economy picking exercise

This week I came up with a new economy picking exercise, which I find particularly efficient in developing accuracy with this type of technique.

Here it is:

You could tackle this exercise by trying a helper exercise, first at a slow speed:

I want to challenge alternate picking enthusiasts to try to play this exercise by using their favorite technique. How fast can you get? How does it feel? I am genuinely interested in your piece of mind, so please write me!

Legato Structures

Legato Structures

The idea for the following exercise came to me by listening to a piano player, and you almost wouldn't say that, because the implementation of this phrase is very "guitaristic" in nature. It involves a diatonic structure in which you play one note on one string followed by three consecutive notes played legato fashion on the upper adjacent string, the first of which is a diatonic third lower than the first note played.

Needless to say, you can, and you should implement this idea in all positions, all usual scales (major, harmonic minor, melodic minor, diminished, wholetone) all over the neck of the guitar. At first you can play the lick in one position and then you might, as it is suggested in the example above, slide from one position to another.

The ability to play this kind of phrases is very valuable in improvisation. Start slow and pay extra attention to the articulation of notes. You can also try the 3/4 version of the lick. The lick creates nice rhythmic effects on both time signatures.

More Directional Picking

I have come up with a great exercise that will help you develop further your directional picking abilities. It is also great for memorizing the fretboard and quickly access fretboard shapes when you're improvising.

The tricky parts of this lick are, as we are already accustomed, the turning points on strings 1 and 5.  The first turning point on string 1 requires the F# note on the second fret to be played with a downstroke followed immediately by an upstroke on the B string, to sound the E note on the 5th fret.

I find the second turning point to be especially difficult: when starting the lick again the first note of the lick will be played with an upstroke followed by a downstroke on the 4th string. This is the part of the lick where you should focus most of your attention. It is particularly difficult because the pick has the tendency either to execute a too wide motion on the upstroke  on the D# (6th fret, 5th string) - which will lead to two problems: either losing fluency either hitting the 5th string again because there is no more time to avoid it in the path to the 4th string - either to execute a to narrow motion in the attempt to strike the 5th string and to miss it. 

I strongly suggest you start practicing the lick at a comfortable speed, even well below the suggested 90 bpm, and work at first at getting all the shapes of the scale under your fingers. (I have provided only the shape for D# Phrygian - scale of B major - you do the rest!). You can then gradually increase the speed. You will see that the problems described above will start to appear at a speed over 100 bpm. It is then when you will be forced to optimize you pick motion and strength, especially when starting the lick from the beginning.

Have fun with the lick. Practice it at least a month, 10-15 minutes a day.

Directional picking

Monster Lick

Directional picking represents the most modern approach to picking and it is arguably the most efficient way of guitar picking. I am not going to debate the claim to supremacy of this style of picking, but I just want to point out that if you need to pick every note of your phrases and aim for a fluent sound characteristic to jazz and / or rock or fusion, directional picking is the style for you.

But what is directional picking? It simply is alternate picking combined with sweep picking every time when you cross strings. It is as simple as that, but in practice poses some problems which we will discuss in the present article.

The first problem which arises is in fact the very same thing that differentiates this style of picking from the so called economy picking as presented in the Gambale method. The Gambale scales are very conveniently arranged so as to always assure that the last motion executed on one string by the right hand is the same as the one executed on the adjacent string. But the point of a technique is to allow you to fluently play any kind of material, no matter how it is arranged on the fretboard. I think it is important to practise exactly the difficult aspects of this technique.

 

As you notice, the difficult spots in the exercise above are those where the pick is forced to execute one motion on one string and the exact opposite motion on the adjacent string. This is the case with notes four and five in the first example as well as for notes sixteen and seventeen. This situation calls for an extremely short motion of the pick in the first direction so that the hand can recoil, avoid the string that has just been picked and continue the motion on to the adjacent string. The two problems presented above refer both to the case in which a higher string is picked with a downstroke followed immediately by an upstroke on a lower string. In the next example we will cover also the case in which a lower string is picked with an upstroke followed by a downstroke on the adjacent higher string.

The first type of problem I will call the down-up problem, and the other one the up-down problem. In a very Gambale fashion I call the above phrase the monster lick of directional picking. It features both down-up problems as well as up-downs. The up-down appears when you try to play the phrase in a continuous form. This will lead to the picking of the very first note of the lick with an upstroke thus constituting a down-up problem followed immediately by an up-down problem (the last note of the lick in conjunction with the first two)

This two problems are often called "inside the strings picking" and are dealt with usually with exercises that repeat the problematic motion over and over again on the same set of adjacent strings (line in the example below)

 

This is a great exercise, but I wanted to treat these problems in the broader context of directional picking and to address the other problem that usually occurs with this type of picking - right hand movement. To preserve the same angle of the pick attack on all the strings the right hand should move up and down the strings, depending on the string that is currently picked. You could also move the hand in a slightly diagonal fashion thus effectively muting the lower strings under the palm of the right hand.

Exercise number 2 should be practiced very slowly at first focusing on freeing the tension that inevitably builds into the right hand shoulder. Pay attention to the evenness of notes, on the articulation and on muting. If you feel that this exercise is too difficult, try warming up by using the other two exercises, played still at a slow tempo. Play this exercise at a very slow tempo (~ 60 bpm) for at least 5 directional picking practicing session. Then raise the metronome speed a bit (10 bpm) and practice for 3 sessions. Do this again until you reach a speed that is no longer comfortable. Then you go back to a lower speed and start the process from the beginning. Of course I also recommend you play the exercise above through all the modes of the major scale, and also through the modes of melodic minor and harmonic minor.

I usually practice directional picking 15 minutes a day and I recommend you do the same. Of course, if you put more time into it, you will see result faster.