60 YEARS OF LEGATO

Legato is a ‘must have’ technique when developing your skills as a guitarist. It’s a way to play smooth, fluid lines, as opposed to the more regimented and percussive sound of alternate picking. Legato is performed with hammer-ons, pull-offs and slides played with the fretting hand. It can produce long, flowing runs, often associated with instruments such as saxophone. It’s not uncommon to hear jazz and fusion guitarists using legato to mimic their wind instrument brethren, while rock guitarists use it to execute smooth runs over extended positions at high speed.

The technique has evolved greatly over the past 60 years, with guitarists forever exploring and pushing boundaries. The 1970s saw huge changes in guitar post Hendrix and Clapton. Jimmy Page, Paul Kossoff and others had been employing legato in fairly basic form, using bluesbased Pentatonic ideas, but in 1978 rock guitar was reinvented overnight, with the release of Van Halen 1. Eddie Van Halen applied legato to rock guitar in a way that had not been seen before. Eddie discovered that by using tapping he could play three-notes-per-string licks and ‘movable shapes’ to create all manner of tonalities. He could produce wide Pentatonic licks and arpeggios, or play Clapton-inspired lead lines, adding extra notes with his tapping finger. This album laid the foundations for even more technically impressive playing.

Through the late 70s and into the 80s, Eddie’s impact was the catalyst for huge developments in rock. It was the dawn of ‘shred’. Steve Vai and Joe Satriani sounded ‘schooled’ and