>> When you're improvising or playing melodic lines,
there are techniques you can use with your fretting hand
to make your melodic lines sound more musical,
more interesting, and give them some depth.
These are in addition to the techniques you use with your picking hand.
I'm talking about dynamics,
tambour, and the envelope of the note.
When you put these things together,
you can get some really cool sounds.
What we're talking about specifically are hammer-ons and pull-offs,
slides, and muting,
which is a combination of your left and right hand,
or in this case,
your fretting hand and your picking hand techniques.
Let's take a look at hammer-ons first.
I'm going to go to the sixth mode of C major,
so that means I'm going to start on an A,
that's the sixth note,
and I'm going to play that mode across.
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There's your pentatonic that you knew.
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I'm going to go to the fourth string of
that sixth mode and I'm going to take a look at those two notes there.
When you want to hammer-on,
what you do is you push down on the lower note,
that huge fret on your string.
In this case, that's your fifth fret on
the fourth string with your first finger. I'm going to play that note.
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Then I'm going to use my third finger like a hammer,
and hammer it down to the fretboard while the original note is still ringing.
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I'm going to try to hit right in the center of the fingertip,
right by the fret,
so that it gives me the best sound.
[MUSIC] That's called the hammer-on because you're
literally using your higher finger to hammer on the note that's ringing.
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You can practice this first with fingers 1 and 3 because they're the strongest.
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Then try some other fingerings in the pattern.
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You'll hear this a lot, like this thing.
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That just gives it a little more connection,
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instead of picking every note.
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That's your hammer-on.
I would suggest practicing it in one pattern,
one spot at first, nice and slow.
The opposite of a hammer-on is a pull-off.
If you went back to our string 4 and put both fingers from that pattern down,
both three and one and you hold onto those,
I'm going play the string and then I'm going to pull
my third finger off the string to create the second note.
It sounds like this.
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If you look, it's not so much that I'm pulling off like pulling up into the sky,
I'm pulling down across the fretboard.
You can see that my third finger almost hits the next string up the third string.
If you pull off,
literally, if you pull up,
[MUSIC] you get a cool sound,
but it's not that strong.
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That second one was pulling down.
Pulling off really means pulling down.
Again, you're going to practice it with every group of
fingers and it's nice way to practice in your pattern.
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You want to just take it easy when you're using weaker fingers.
Go nice and slow and be patient with yourself as you pull-off.
Sliding is another cool sound.
You can also go back to our original string.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to put my third finger now on
the fifth fret note of the fourth string with the idea that I'll play the string,
keep the pressure down,
and slide my finger up to the fret 7 in the pattern.
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Then the speed at which you slide,
like how long you let the original note last,
gives you a different sound.
You could go right away.
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I really almost didn't let it ring at all,
I just played and right away,
I started to move with the pressure down
or I could let it ring longer like I did the first time.
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Either way, you'll hear in some riffs
like one of the ones we played earlier in the course.
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That's a common one where the guitar player would just slide right away,
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You can slide with any finger,
but commonly, we slide with
the third finger because then it sets your hand up in a strong position.
You can practice doing that in all of your modal patterns.
The last one is muting.
People will often call it palm muting because
there's an aspect of your picking technique that goes into
this where you literally put the side of your palm down on the strings.
Classical guitarist call it pizzicato.
You get, instead of say,
an open string sound like this,
[MUSIC] you get a muted sound like this.
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If you combine that with
the left-hand technique of picking up your fingers right after you hear the note,
you get this sound.
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That can be a really cool technique to add into your planning.
That one mixes two things together.
It mixes something with your fretting hand and with your picking hand.
Practice these things again, practice them slowly.
Find a small area that feels
manageable to you and just see how many different sounds you can get.
Combine this with the idea of tambour dynamics and envelope from
our previous work and you'll have a lot of
tools to work with and getting a great sound that sounds like you.