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GMC Forum _ PRACTICE ROOM _ Summertime Pentatonic Practising

Posted by: gitarcitolga Jul 23 2011, 04:10 PM

Hey guyz,

Unfortunately my mother insisted on taking me to our summer house with her. So I had to get my guitar and Boss JS8 e-band and bring them with me to our summerouse. Im gonna stay here for a couple weeks. I have a limited Internet here so can't view GMC videos and practise on them. So here my questions are on A minor pentatonic scale ( Ivan, sorry I cant watch your nice lesson on pentatonic scale at the moment)
1. I began pentatonic practising just like this: All 5 pentatonic + their octave shapes down and up on the neck alt. picking with 3 notes per beat (Im at 116 bpm at the moment) and 4notes per beat (90 bpm at the moment). I dont know my target on metronom so how long should I practise this down and up all alt picking?
2. After that I'll jump to string skipping same patterns, alt. picking, with 3 notes per beat and 4 notes per beat again all same as above, what should my target bpm be?
3. I will do all above with tremolo picking again. 2,3,4 times picking do you think this is useful?
4. Finally I'll do same down and up with legato playing. Do you have any suggestions for legatos? Can I do 2,3,4 H.O and P.O all together on above patterns down and up again? Is it useful? What else I can do with legato technique?
With all these practising down and up alt picking,string skipping, and legato; I want to do it also horizontally on every each 2 strings. But still it will sound like a practise session, not like making licks. So my final question is how can I make licks, for example how can I practise bending and vibrato on this scale practising? Do you have any extra suggetions for me? one last question...How long should I practise A minor pentatonic scale? Should I jump to C,E,G...etc..pentatonic minors or I should totally jump to blues scale or minor scale or something else..what would you guys say?

Posted by: Ivan Milenkovic Jul 23 2011, 06:52 PM

Hey mate,

have fun there, I always had great sessions when I go to country with my guitar

As far as pentatonics, you pretty much have an idea of what to practice. You can practice any of those, I went through all those series you talk about, and did some more elaborate moves on the pentatonic, for example, this is box 1 on the 5th fret, starting from low E string (I hope you'll see what I mean)

A C D E - C D E G - D E G A - E G A C etc... this way you can climb or..

A E D C - D A G E - G D C A - C G E D etc..

so there are many ways you can systematize your pentatonic sessions, and anything you choose will be beneficial, you won't waist any time, it will help you develop.

however, I advise that you enrich your sessions. The systems you mentioned seem like a whole lot of pentatonic. For proper balanced sessions I advise working on several things at once, chords, rhythm, arpeggios, diatonic, pentatonic scale etc.. All these areas need equal amount of work. As far as picking hand goes, practicing AP, EP or legato on most of these is what is recommended too.

Posted by: Gabriel Leopardi Jul 27 2011, 02:45 AM

Great practice session! You could jam over a backing track in A minor to practice bending, vibrato, licks and continue incorporating the scale boxes.

Here you'll find a backing in A minor that I used for a Collaboration.

http://www.guitarmasterclass.net/guitar_forum/index.php?showtopic=39286

Posted by: Cosmin Lupu Jul 27 2011, 12:19 PM

Mate, regardless of what you practice - you should think about your maximum reachable tempo in the following way:

- pick a tempo where you can play comfortable WITHOUT warming up first - let's call it your milestone tempo actually
- after writing it down, slow it down to 80 % and gradually work your way up, adding 5 BPM until you feel that you can't execute the phrase relaxed. Go down as many units as needed to a tempo where you can execute stuff as relaxed and clean as possible (is it over your milestone discovered tempo?)

if the answer is yes, you could look at this as being your new milestone tempo what you have to do next in order to slowly make progress, is add units to the metronome until you can comfortably play at the maximum speed where you can perform relaxed and clean. Stop there and go back to the milestone tempo, perform through it once again and that should conclude the session.

Now the idea is to slowly push up this milestone tempo as far as you can until you will be able to perform relaxed at a high speed even if you are not warmed up. Usually, in life, we don't quite have the time to warm up you definitely have to warm up, but let's say you're having a gig, before that, you have stuff to do, and so on, until you realize that you have to walk on stage and you never managed to warm up.

Hope I was coherent enough if not, do ask