Slurred notes in guitar music are played with one hand alone, and therefore the right-left coordination which is so important in playing other notes does not exist. Once you truly master slurs, they are very easy to maintain, because most of the work in playing the guitar has been proven to be right-left coordination. Therefore, it makes no sense to go through your guitar playing life, even if you are not yet very accomplished, playing slurs that are not as good or better than those of a concert star who practices for four hours every day.
Too many guitar players are able to play slurs just well enough to get by most of the time. They probably have a problem slurring with the fourth finger three or four times in rapid succession, for example. Some guitarists who are considered to be front rank players display appalling ineptitude in slurring by often playing them weakly or missing them altogether.
Very bad training is the cause. If they practice slur exercises at all, the ones they practice are directed at the wrong goals. Meaningless finger patterns are supposed to equalize and smooth the performance of slurs and improve ability at the same time. That is the way nearly all pages and books of slur exercises are constructed, and they are no good at all, because the goals of such exercises are not only poorly defined, they are plain wrong.
If you restrict yourself to practicing only those slurs in whatever you perform, you are no better off. You are not setting your goals with enough ambition. You can’t learn to shoot with a rifle in one hand and a target in the other. Exercises should be suited to the goals in the future, never to the student in the present. If you stick to your repertoire, your slurs will never be better than passable, even on a good day.
An example of a bad slur exercise is: 1⌢2, 2⌢3, 3⌢4…
All exercises of any nature without correct goals are necessarily utterly worthless and couterproductive.
All you can do with a slur exercise that is not real music is to get power in the fingers to get loudness in the sound. You want to work on loudness to the complete exclusion of every other consideration. To make slurs sound good, you need real music. If the exercise hurts you too much, do it for less time, never with less effort.
You cannot polish what you have not first rough ground.
The right hand is irrelevant, so use the right hand thumb alone, or a pick of course.
Your goal is to execute the rising slurs with sufficient strength to splinter the fretboard, cut the string, and drive the fret into the fretboard. You want to execute the descending slurs with sufficient strength to break the string. One might stop a bit short of these goals, ☺ but that is the correct attitude. Do not try to make this exercise sound good or musical. Instead make every effort to make every single slur sound as loud as possible, and keep the execution precise and mechanical.
Unlike the chords, arpeggios, and scales, there is no right-left coordination issue with slurs. consequently, very little time expended will produce prodigious improvement in a very short time, provided there is enough effort. Practice this three or four times a week. If you do it daily, you are not doing it with enough effort.
Do each of the six tasks for 45 to 60 seconds without intermission. Time them with your eye on an ordinary watch or clock, and don’t stop or pause between them for any reason. Try to play the slur as loudly as you can, and all notes should be precisely even in time. Too much speed is the main problem with slurs in performance. John William’s explanation is that the lack of necessity to coordinate the right hand with the left is the cause. It makes no sense whatever to work at trying to get a faster tempo. Do not on any account change the order of the tasks to reduce fatigue. A few weeks at 13½ to 18 minutes a week will make you very good at this.
Start with the 3rd finger at the 11th fret. Parentheses indicate the string. Your 3rd finger moves from string to string but always is at the 11th fret. You hammer on the 12th fret. Instead of ⌢ or ⌣ I am using ~.
(1) (2) (3) (2) (3) (4) (3) (4) (5) (4) (5) (6)
||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||
You continue by descending to the 10th fret and proceeding in reverse.
(6) (5) (4) (5) (4) (3) (4) (3) (2) (3) (2) (1)
||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :|
Then descend to the 9th fret and proceed as you started.
(1) (2) (3) (2) (3) (4) (3) (4) (5) (4) (5) (6)
||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||
Then descend to the 8th fret...
(6) (5) (4) (5) (4) (3) (4) (3) (2) (3) (2) (1)
||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :||: 3~4 3~4 3~4 :|
and continue in the same manner until the alloted time, not to exceed one minute, is up. It doesn’t matter how far you get. Slow and loud and sounding bad is better than fast and light and sounding good.
Start with the 4th finger at the 12th fret and do the same thing that you just did, except pull off 4~3 instead of hammering on 3~4.
It is necessary to make sure that you have substantially the same hand position whether you are doing rising or descending slurs. That is the only reason for this task. It is after the previous two in order to prevent any recovery or rest. Force the finger to move, and continue to hit the string as hard as you can, no matter how much you have to slow down. If you cannot continue, then go on to the next task, but from now on do each task for 45 seconds instead of one minute. Cut the time as much as you have to, but keep the effort up, and keep practicing each of the six tasks for exactly the same period of time.
(1) (3) (2) (4) (3) (5) (4) (6)
||: 3~4~3 4~3~4 :||: 3~4~3 4~3~4 :||: 3~4~3 4~3~4 :||: 3~4~3 4~3~4 :||
Descend, reverse and continue as before.
Do Exercise 1 again but use 2~3, not 3~4.
Do Exercise 2 again but use 3~2, not 4~3.
Do Exercise 3 again but use 2~3~2, 3~2~3, not 3~4~3, 4~3~4.
No rest is allowed until you finish them all. It is crucial to get to the point where your finger really doesn’t want to do any more, and then force it to continue for some number of seconds. A term in weight training research for the state of not being able to think of much except how much you want to stop is the “agony point”. You must do the exercise with your eye on a watch face or on a clock, and no session should exceed one minute for each of the six tasks, totalling six minutes. If this ever becomes easy, it will be time to start at the ninth or tenth fret and work up the neck instead of down, onto the short frets. It should not be necessary to do these often or regularly once you have mastered them. You will have mastered them when you find no slurs anywhere which present you with any trace of a difficulty. If you follow directions, that won’t take long.
This exercise will greatly benefit your performance of any music which you may play which has slurs in it. If you don’t play anything with slurs in it, maybe it’s time you started.
Tech is good for a lifetime, these are good whenever you need to brush them up, which with any luck at all won’t be very often. If you ever need to practice a slur exercise which is not music again, come back to these. There cannot possibly be anything else just as good, or even close, now or ever, because there is no better example anywhere of an exercise more precisely suited to its goals.
Slur exercises are not “tech” like Dynamic Guitar Technique, because right-left coordination is not a factor with slurs. Nevertheless, there is an important similarity. The excellence of these exercises results from correctly marrying appropriate tasks to the correct goals. The failure of my predecessors and colleagues to fully comprehend how exercises should be formed is the reason for their failure to write decent exercises.