Legato in Single String Etude #5 by Frank A. Wallace
Legato melodies sing
Single String Etude #5 provides more opportunity to improve your melodic skills. What are melodic skills? This series of videos and articles offers a simple oversight of various techniques to enhance your playing: legato, portamento, glissando, timbre and more. The music is from the book of simple artistic etudes entitled Sketches I. Purchase a PDF download here.
Knotted together
Legato literally means tied together. I use to explain the concept with my fists butting up to each other. Each hand represents two notes that have no gap between them. So there’s no nail click, no fret buzz, and no silence between the notes.
Then I thought again about the word legato – knotted. In a knot, the two strings are woven together making one. That’s the purpose of a knot. So now, with my fingers intertwined, I visually emphasize that two notes need to be closer than possible. Well we guitarists can actually do that by playing two melodic notes on separate strings. In scale passages this is called campanella, another Italian word meaning bell tower. But I believe good taste requires that this campanella technique be reserved for fast scale passages, its original purpose in Baroque guitar literature. In slower true melodic passages, it is best to avoid any overhanging notes with harmonic implications. It muddies the intent.
Most common problem in guitar performance
The inadvertent gap between two melodic notes is always there! It is in the nature of our activity. Both hands take a millisecond or two to touch the string before accomplishing their goal. That is pressing the string to the fret in the left, and plucking in the right.
Therefore legato playing only happens when these two actions are simultaneous and efficient. If there is even the slightest delay between them you’ve added at least four or five milliseconds, or perhaps many more. Too much!
I edit my own recordings. I notice time and again that I can fix a bad edit by adding or subtracting three or four milliseconds! It is truly amazing to me that the ear can detect such a small difference.
And so it behooves us to focus on simple training to perfect not just the hands, but the ears that guide the hands. The degree to which both hands attack a note together makes the primary difference between a good player and a bad one! Milliseconds make the difference.
Take a look at all my tutorial videos and blogs. Or just the previous blog:
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