Hi! I'm Dan Leonard and in this clip I'm going to be talking about techniques that are commonly used in jazz mainly with regard to the picking hand.
So, I'm going to go back to the G major scale and demonstrate these three ways, one way is with alternate picking where I'm going to be strictly alternating down an upstrokes, so, playing the scale that way [Demonstration]. It's like that.
And then there is a technique called Economy Picking in which when you go from one string to the next—from one adjacent string to the next you repeat this in the case of the ascending scale or you repeat a down stroke as you cross. So, now the picking is going to go up-down-down, up-down-down, up-down-down, up-down-down, I'll go that far on the scale. Here it is at a medium tempo [Demonstration]. And as you descend in the scale, as you cross strings you’ll end up with consecutive upstrokes. So, I'll take it from the root here, you’ll have, up-down-up, up-down-up, up-down. So that's another common picking technique, it's a little more economical than alternate picking but they both have their value.
Another good way to practice scales is strictly Legato technique where you pick as little as possibly basically only when you get to a new string and you use hammer-ons and pull-offs to articulate the notes [Demonstration which builds facility with your fretting hand.
So, I would recommend practicing all of your scale fingerings these three ways or at least experimenting and see what feels best to you. Alternate picking is definitely the most conventional and economy-used technique. So, I would certainly focus on that the most.
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