MAKE IT SOUND LIKE
ONE UNBROKEN STREAM.
A chromatic picking pattern with rests built into it, so you get a moment to reset every time it moves to a new string. Tab is on screen throughout. This is the one I would keep in your routine permanently.
Tab on screen throughout ยท Play along as many times as you like
Three Things Before
You Play It
This runs in six four. In practice that means you play for four beats, then you rest for two. Every time.
Those two beats are not padding and they are not there to be filled. They are the window where you look ahead, find the next string, and get the right finger ready before it arrives.
Most players lose this pattern at the string change, not in the middle of a bar. The rest is what lets you internalize the shape instead of scrambling into it.
Do not fill the rest. Use it.
The string transitions are tricky and the picking is a real challenge, but neither is the thing that catches people out.
It is that the fretting finger keeps changing. You are moving back and forth between fingers constantly, and getting the right one down at the right moment, in time with the right picking stroke, is genuinely confusing the first few times through.
Which is exactly why it works. When I play this I am not letting my wrist move in to help my fingers out. Each finger does its own work, on its own, and I can feel every one of them individually.
That is also why my fretting hand feels completely warmed up after only a couple of repetitions. Not just the picking hand. Both.
I wish I had something clever for this one. I do not. But two things will make a visible difference straight away.
- Keep a straight angle with your fretting hand. Chromatic patterns like this get much easier when your hand is square to the neck rather than tilted one way or the other
- Do not touch the strings you are not playing. Not with your pick, not with your hand. Most of what makes this sound messy is contact you did not intend
And then the actual goal, which is worth aiming at from day one.
I always want a lick like this to come out as one long uninterrupted stream of notes. The string transitions are in there, the finger changes are in there, the difficulty is in there. Nobody listening should be able to hear any of it.
Hide the hard parts. That is the standard.
Keep this one. A couple of repetitions before you practice anything else and both hands are ready to work, which beats spending the first ten minutes of every session getting up to temperature.
Have a lot of fun with this one.
โ Bernth
