artist toolkit with guitarguitar
hey guys this is nick johnston hanging out once again in guitarguitar and i'm
going to show you some stuff from my artist toolkit i've been asked to kind of demonstrate
a little bit of my legato technique which is something i've been more or less working on
developing and constantly maintaining for about 20 years quick things to note i'm left-handed so
a lot of this stuff that i'm going to talk about or a lot of the stuff maybe you've seen me play
is sort of almost on an unconscious level because it's my dominant hand there's like little weird
muscle twitch kind of things that happen in my playing and my right hand does a bunch of muting
there's always something going on with like for example if i'm playing something where i have like
this hand is kind of on standby to mute everything
for example if i'm playing this note let's say i have a d everything around it
is going to be muted naturally so that's something just right off the bat if you're getting strings
ringing i'm using quite a bit of gain too because why not it's fun if you're getting
a lot of strings ringing and just external noise and stuff just remember it's all about the muting
i'm going to show you some of the stuff i've been up to lately i'm kind of right in the middle of
a clinic tour so i've been going on stage every night and talking about guitar and technique and
playing and all that wonderful stuff and i've started to even notice a few things changing
because this is the first time in about two and a half years where i've gone up and played live so
i'm noticing my playing has evolved just even getting on stage every night and one other thing
to note is i'm now using this piece of metal here i'm using a whammy bar whereas for years and years
i used to claw at the bridge like an animal and i got sick of having bloody knuckles from banging my
hand against it so i figured i'd do the the more gentlemanly thing and use a whammy bar
with that being said let's kind of get into it so the way i've kind of developed my technique is
you know it's very left hand dominant i use what's called hybrid picking so i'm kind of
treating the middle fingers a lot of up strokes and i like to do sort of the type of thing where i
i take a shape or some sort of pattern and i'm able to plug it into different positions on the
neck so if i learn how to do something it could be something as simple as this
you know it's just a pattern it's just a shape but i'm able to plug
it in all over the place so that's kind of you know nick johnson legato 101 but
what i've really been getting into lately is sliding into stuff with the bar
and trying to connect lines with a lot of chromatics and sort of trying to play very lazily
laser lacefully as a lazy player trying to connect stuff with that for example say i was an a minor
what i would maybe do is
let's see if i do that a little faster it won't be exactly like that but
the approximation is what counts here
trying to do stuff like that where i'm connecting a lot of chromatics together
it's almost creating this tension but it knows where it wants to go it kind of wants to resolve
and the way i'm looking at the neck there it's all modal like i'm basically just looking at
so it's all kind of modal but i'm just kind of connecting the dots a little bit
you know and then if i was to keep going with that let's say uh
which is you know absurd especially when i'm tapping up some of these higher notes
but it's really all about getting the momentum sliding into it using the bar to kind of swoop the
note almost like cradle the note and then just use some of these patterns so let's kind of break some
of this stuff down one thing i love to do is let's say take a little bit of the a minor scale so
use the top of that one thing i like to do is go like this
and then i'll use the pinky finger to kind of bar the note so i'll get
so again real slow
if you watch this hand too you can see what's happening
it's just two picks a down and an upstroke with a middle finger
if i maybe connected that all over the neck
pretty cool especially if you're trying to avoid just playing three note per string pick stuff you
get bigger kind of interval jumps especially if you're skipping strings let's say we have that
let's see if i can do this here
so stupid but uh it's just all about plugging in that pattern
into whatever you can think of if it was all diminished stuff you know
something like that just trying to get that bar and that kind of whipping motion with the hand
it's all it's all just developing the hand strength i mean none of this is going to
happen overnight this has been decades of practice and i remember i used to come home from school
in high school and i would just take these little ideas even like you know something like this
basically until it sounded like a raindrop on a tin roof
and then a bigger stretch
working all those finger finger groupings but you know it's really it's really just about
how creative can you get with it how much can you how much can you use the key you're in what chord
you're playing over like if i'm playing over an a minor again obviously i know i can do all that
joe satriani stuff but i could also use you know all sorts of different intervals i could play
let's start on the seven maybe
so now i'm getting a little bit more tension so i'm like paying attention to the key i'm in
i can also kind of weave in and out of it a little bit
and this is all sorts of stuff i'm thinking when i'm improvising or playing over chord changes
but i think with any technique you have to
sort of step back from the person you're trying to learn it from or the licks you're trying to learn
from and maybe think about what your strengths and weaknesses are i've tried to learn over the years
you know parts or ideas from other guitar players you know i remember trying to learn the flying and
blue dream kind of those lines when i was a kid i could never do them my brain doesn't work that way
but the the intention or the the idea of what's kind of going on behind the scenes is really what
i was paying attention that's just that left hand strength developing patterns that work for you um
getting your pull-offs actually pulled off not just taking off they're not called take-offs
it's a bad joke sorry um and then connecting them across the neck so let's do one more
that's what i want you to practice here's your uh here's your homework from this video
taking a c chord and here's what we're going to do i'm going to go let's follow along
okay one more time and watch this hand too there's very little picking going on
faster
see this is one of those ones where it's either playing slow or really fast it doesn't really
sound good if it's anything but fast but it's the top of practicing okay up to speed
you should be able to skip this kind of like did it did did it thing going on different key
if i move that around a bit let's see if i can do it
good luck so what's really cool now um is over the pandemic i i sort of
had this this big idea this big project uh where i wanted to essentially unscrew the top of my head
and dump everything out into a video series i created this course called purpose it's a
it's a beast it's about 14 15 hours long and it kind of covers everything from uh technique
to music business songwriting production we go in the studio and break down
remarkable human and wide eyes and a bunch of stuff i've done um crazy amount of content
so please check that out nick johnstonpurpose.com where you can see that
but uh i've been nick johnston at guitarguitar and that has been my artist toolkit thank you guys