LIKE A PAINTER’S brush stroke or an author’s turn of phrase, every great guitarist has a signature touch, which is a confluence of many factors, from musical influences and equipment choices to all aspects of technique. But at the most granular level of anyone’s playing you’ll find one crucial element: their unique approaches to note articulation. Articulation is the musical term for the way you attack an individual note or chord, as well as the way you connect one note to another. Examples of guitar articulations include picking with a downstroke or upstroke (each of which sounds a little different), fingerpicking, thumbpicking, palm muting, staccato phrasing (cutting a note’s durations short) and legato techniques, such as hammering-on, pulling-off and tapping. Combined with other expressive elements involving the fret hand, such as sliding from note to note, bending and/or shaking a string (vibrato), the possibilities for giving notes and phrases an expressive, vocal-like quality are wide ranging and nearly limitless. So how do you know which articulations to use and when? Developing a good instinct for this artform can take years of diligent practice to attain, and it can be perplexing to know where to start, but it is foundational to anyone’s playing. This lesson will help you hone your note articulation skills and cultivate your own signature touch and lead-playing style.
DYNAMICS
Tragically, the importance of , or volume contrasts, is often ignored, when in reality it is arguably as important as the other four elements of music — , , and (tone). Dynamics refers to variances in your volume or the intensity of your playing throughout a piece of music. With respect to pick-hand articulations, it involves certain notes, which means picking or plucking them more forcefully than normal, giving them greater emphasis so that they stand out. Using accents gives a melody a sense of liveliness. To demonstrate. Without any accents or variation in pitch or articulation, we have a monotonous, droning stream of notes. Add accents on every downbeat, by picking the first 16th note harder than normal, as in , and suddenly it begins to sound like music. But the fun really begins when you start varying the placement of accents so that they fall on some of the too, as illustrated in . By shifting some of the accents to the second, third or fourth 16th note of the beat, we develop a sense of syncopation in the music, creating depth and building momentum where there wasn’t any before. And this is only with one repeating note, comparable to the way a drummer will use dynamic accents within a steady stream of 16th notes on the snare.
