Three-Note Chromatic Pull-Off

Three-Note Chromatic Pull Off Hi, I'm Grey and this is Hub Guitar. Here's a great little technique I like to use sometimes to get three notes for the price of one. This works by taking advantage of the relative easiness of the pull-off technique. We'll start by fretting four notes on the same string. Of course, it'd be easiest to use four adjacent frets, but any combination of four notes on one string is possible, as long as you can reach with your fingers to fret all four notes at the same time. I'm going to prepare frets V, VI, VII and VIII with all four fingers on the high E string. Then we'll pluck the string, which will result in the highest note ringing out. Now we'll slowly pull-off from the high notes down to the lower notes. We'll repeat this motion continually, slowly building up speed. When you're practicing this it may not sound great. In fact, due to the chromatic nature of the four adjacent half-steps, it might not even sound very musical. But something interesting happens as we approach higher speeds. The four notes begin to blend into one. Instead of acting as four discrete notes, they start to sound as single note, decorated by three ultra-fast "extra" notes. Although this chromatic example will definitely use notes that are "out of the key", it's best to make sure that the final note you land on is actually a good one, because it's just not going to sound right if you land on a sour note. It would also be great if the first note you played was in the key. And if one of the in-between notes is in the key as well, then there will only be a single sour out-of-key note. And it really won't be heard as an individual note, but only as a decoration. So try this out. This is a really great way to "decorate" the final note with its 3 upper neighbors. It will sound great in your improvisation, or as an embellishment to a melody. For example, if the melody note was "A", here at the Vth fret, I could embellish it by first playing these 3 notes.