Guitar Slur Exercises

Slur Exercises Hi I'm Grey and this is Hub Guitar. We're going to talk about the techniques on the guitar that create musical slurs. Slurs are when multiple notes are blurred together to form a coherent sequence. In vocal music, this is sometimes called a melisma. Every instrument has a different way of accomplishing this. But for guitar players, our options are limited. That's because the instrument has frets. So our options are limited to techniques which takes a fretted note, and changes it to another fretted note on the same string. The key will be that we will not re-articulate the second note. What I mean by that is that we will pluck the first note and perform a technique leading to a second note but the second note will not itself be plucked. We can actually combine this into multiple notes played altogether. The techniques that we have available to create slurs include: bends, slides, hammer ons, and pull-offs. That's about it. So to practice this technique of playing a lot of notes for the price of one, you can try linking together these different techniques. You'll notice that these techniques are all single string techniques. We cannot blend the notes together that belong to two different strings. So there will be a lot of playing up and down a single string. And that's what makes the guitar sound so distinctive. These different techniques all add flavor and interest to our playing. So let's use a simple scale, and make a few different combinations using these techniques.(demonstrate) Below I've given another specific example in case you'd like something written out to follow. However, like with all techniques, you'll be able to best master it by developing your own understanding of it and applying it in your own way.