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One of the simplest, most useful, and most intuitive areas of guitar – playing on single strings – happens to be one of the most neglected.

Most guitar methods and teachers emphasize position playing (i.e. learning scales and chords on all 6 strings in one area of the guitar at a time) exclusively, and that includes for beginners, but exactly zero on ear training and playing up and down the length of each single guitar string. Though it’s the easiest way to begin.

I was a victim of these methods. When I began playing, I spent a lot of time practicing with diagrams that looked like this:

Here’s the problem: the scale diagram shows where to place your fingers, but not what notes you are playing or why or how to use them. Relationships among notes, and indeed the identity of notes themselves are completely obscure and invisible. Practicing a scale like this helps to develop dexterity, muscle memory, and pattern recognition, but not creativity, imagination or expression. It leaves your ear and instincts almost completely out of the equation, and puts automatic pattern recall in charge of making music instead.

It’s no wonder that so many guitarists let their fingers do the talking rather than their imaginations, getting by with mechanical technique rather than expression. Those who’ve practiced patterns but can’t see the notes on their guitars, or hear them before they play them, cling to a few familiar positions, relying on hackneyed patterns and licks. They learn guitar solos purely through mimicry, but without gaining musical understanding or the ability to apply ideas from solos creatively in other contexts.

A Path to Freedom
If your goal as a lead guitarist is to attain freedom of expression, a better place to start is learning the art of single string playing.

I was fortunate to learn this approach when I was a young guitar player in Boston in the 1980’s. Pat Metheny had recently been a resident and teacher there, and Mick Goodrick was playing local clubs and teaching at New England Conservatory. Both of these seminal guitarists emphasized the importance of single-string playing, and I was able to watch Mick play, and study his approach with one his top students (to whom he graciously introduced me). At that time Mick was writing his now famous, influential, and essential book The Advancing Guitarist in which he elaborates on the importance of the single string approach.

Playing on single strings is critical to gaining melodic mastery because:

• playing on one string is intuitive and develops the ear since there is a direct relationship between interval distance and movement in space
• the entire guitar fret board is used right away
• expressive techniques including articulation, dynamics, timbre and phrasing can be developed and applied right away
• elements of music theory including intervals, scales, chords and arpeggios can be seen and comprehended (because the simplest way to see notes is in a straight line)
• it promotes learning note locations because of the absence of patterns to rely on

The Ear Connection
I begin each of my students with single-string playing before moving to position playing and the CAGED method. I start them playing scales and modes on triads, using the 48 FREE backing tracks that we provide. During single-string study the ear and imagination are engaged, intuition and impulse are developed, The guitarist listens carefully to each note of the scale, absorbing the qualities and functions of each note, experimenting with making simple one-string melodies to learn through their own experience how chord and scale tones function melodically when played over chords.

Then, when position playing is introduced, the player is equipped to go beyond mere memorization of patterns and working out the fingers. She can mine the notes in scale patterns by connecting them with her ear and intuition and musical understanding, and use them in the service of creativity and expression.

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How to Practice Guitar with Backing Tracks
Use Loops and Backing tracks to Learn Lead Guitar

© 2016 Brenna Method