Pizzazz My Sunshine

Now that we have some ways to arrange a tune, the next step is one that can help you get into a more improvisational style. It’s a way to start adding small variations to what we’ve already worked on, and with this we’ll be able to add a little pizzazz to our arrangements. One of the easiest ways to start coming up with variations is to use slurs. We have three different types of slurs: hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides.

We’re going to go through each of them one at a time. It’s best to limit yourself to a one or two things at a time. If you work on much more than that you can run the risk of getting overwhelmed, and not making any progress. We’re going to go through each of the slurs, starting with the hammer-on.

If you’ve never performed a hammer-on it’s done by picking one note, and then using the force of a finger hammering down on the next note, so we get two notes with only on pick stroke. You can do this from an open string to a fretted note, or from a fretted note to a fretted note. Here are a few examples:

Keep in mind that you want the hammer-on to sound as loud as if you had picked it. If it’s not, you can do some exercises that will help you develop the strength, volume, and clarity. We can do that by taking the above examples, and playing them across the strings. I would recommend doing these every day until you develop the desired strength, volume, and clarity. These make great warm ups, so you could use them at the beginning of your practice sessions. Here are the exercises:

In order to incorporate this into the song I put a hammer-on before most of the main melody notes. There are a couple reasons for this: one being to accent the melody note, and two to add variation to the melody. When we put the hammer-on there it pushes the melody note a half a beat forward which creates a very nice variation through syncopation. It’s a little unexpected because the melody doesn’t land where it normally would. Let’s check it out:

Now we have our first variation using the hammer-on. As we start to accumulate the variations we can start to mix and match versions of one with other versions to come up with endless variations, so be sure to experiment with adding some of the ideas from this arrangement to some of the other arrangements.

In the next session we’ll talk about using the pull-off to add pizzazz, and create a new variation for our song in Pizzazz My Sunshine Part 2.

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Happy Picking!