Pat Metheny's Guitar Technique - Part I
In-Depth Analysis Of Pat Metheny's Technique - Part I
I always have been practicing and analyzing Pat Metheny Solos for my own enjoyment and personal research. I always have such a blast doing it not only because I'm playing the music that I always enjoyed listening to growing up, but also because there are so many little nuances you will discover along the way, that you never even thought existed before.
What I noticed early on is that you can memorize and copy all the notes of a solo as much as you want, but if you don’t have Pat's technique down to at least some degree, it obviously just won’t sound like it. The last 10% of the sound will be always kind of missing. And if you are already committed to tackling and memorizing a Metheny solo, then I think you really should go that extra mile and try to copy the guitar solo as accurately as possible to get the most value out of it.
I have been looking around the internet for clues on how to demystify some of Pat's techniques, and there is great content out there, but somehow I always felt that maybe some parts are missing or I'm not getting the entire picture of what's going on. So that's why I wanted to share today some of the tricks and thoughts that I picked up over the years to make your guitar solos sound a bit more like Pat Metheny or come at least a little bit closer to it.
My goal is to provide you with some guidelines so that whenever you want to practice a Pat Metheny solo, it will sound a bit more authentic. When it comes to his technique, there are minor little details that are missing in his transcription books of his, so I will try my best to just share some of these with you now. I will probably do more blogs and videos in the future about specific solos of his that will go into more depth and detail. So this blog should serve more as a prerequisite to the upcoming ones. This is probably going to take more than one blog to explain. So get ready for it.
Now one little thing I would like to get out of the way is that a lot of jazz people will probably tell you “Oh you shouldn’t practice these Metheny licks and you can’t use them at your next gig” …Well yeah, obviously I’m not going to use them. But I’m still a Metheny fan and I do play the guitar, I will always be a student of the guitar and I want to know how this works and demystify it.
So there is nothing wrong with trying to learn and disassemble the music that you like or trying to play along to. That’s the way this usually works as far as I know. And since you found this blog, I assume you want to learn something in a similar way and take some inspiration from it. So let it inspire you and you can also see what’s actually possible on the instrument. What you do with it, is ultimately your choice obviously. Just as a little side note here and don’t forget, it’s also a lot of fun!
Flow and Inverted Picking
Most people will point out the obvious that Pat inverts the downstrokes to upstrokes in his right hand. Now if you look at any footage of him online, you can clearly see him doing it in many situations when he also actually has the time to do it. Like when there is a simple melodic, singable phrase going on, maybe just on a single string and not some crazy chromatic line. He is almost exaggerating it to get that popping sound.
But what is actually happening when there are faster, busier phrases going on? When he doesn`t have much time and has to switch to more “auto-pilot” to catch his faster signature phrases. Is he still inverting his picking then? Things go by so fast, it’s really hard to catch, but I think it’s a very important detail and cornerstone to his guitar playing.
His right hand does get into this flow of picking the upbeats but at the same time, he also tries to avoid picking the downbeats and also slurs if possible into the downbeats which enables that subtle flow even more.
Let me show you what I mean and let’s go back to the absolute basics and strip away all the notes and just look at the rhythms first.
So when we have a regular 4/4 bar filled with eighth notes, we would of course have eight possible starting points within this grid or subdivision.
Now, this shouldn’t be any news to anybody here interested in this material I assume, but just in case.
So you have a downbeat and an upbeat, a downbeat and an upbeat alternating, and so on.
If you count it, it would be 1 and, 2 and, 3, and so on. There is the downbeat of 1, upbeat of 1, Downbeat of 2, Upbeat of 2, and so on. And your head would naturally go down, up, down, up, which by the way also translates on the guitar into down, up, down, up…right? That’s what you would instinctively do on the guitar and feel in your body.
Now if we invert our right hand picking directions, we would start with an upstroke which goes against your instinct because your head would naturally go down. So this feels really awkward if you do it for the first time.
Now you can see here that I highlighted every upbeat now with a downstroke. And as I said earlier, Pat tries to avoid picking the downbeat if possible. So when we take that away, we are left with this:
And now let’s fill in the gaps by only using hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides for the downbeats, you will end up with this formula. This is just an example, but you can see that the first note gets slided into, the next note is picked with a downstroke, then we have a hammer-on which is followed again by a downstroke, and so on. So basically only the upbeats are attacked with a downstroke and the rest is all slurred.
Also, don’t forget that a downstroke is naturally a little stronger and heavier than an upstroke. This technique will automatically give the upbeat a stronger articulation which most jazz players put a huge emphasis on.
They want to get that better swing feel, which is really hard to do on the guitar in the first place, but I think this technique will automatically get you into that state much faster where you are almost playing even eighth notes instead of the dotted eighth note and sixteenth note. And on top of that, this picking technique will give you a little boost to play faster while using less energy and sounding smoother at the same time.
Now, these are just some guidelines. They are not written in stone and it's just a basic rule of thumb, but he is definitely able to switch to this mode when it’s necessary. You can also see other modern Jazz guitar players inverting their picking directions here and there when it’s necessary, but maybe not to the extreme as Pat does it.
So before we work on some actual phrases of Pat, I would highly recommend to you to start with just a simple kind of warm-up exercise that highlights this technique or flow he can get into with this inverted picking.
What I usually do with students first that want to get into Pat's style is just take a simple C major or C Ionian Bebop scale and try this out first. Alternatively, you could of course also go through all of the scales and licks you usually play and try to see where you can invert everything. You could spend a few months just practicing this little technique. There definitely is some rewiring going on in the brain when you try to invert all the picking directions that you are so used to. So that is the reason why I would start with something very simple first.
Here we go with our first example. So let's just take a simple C Ionian Bebop Scale or C Major Bebop scale and apply what I mentioned above. So instead of just playing this the regular way like down, up, down, up….We are going to pick the first note with an upstroke. The next note D will be a Downstroke. The E will be an upstroke again, then downstroke on F… and now instead of picking the G, let's hammer into it. ….The G# we pick with a Downstroke and slide into the A. Then another Downstroke for B that hammers into the C again.
So as I have mentioned earlier this technique doesn't work for every lick and phrase on this planet, but you can already see just with this one bar that we already skipped picking a few downbeats and only picked the upbeats with a heavy downstroke.
Let's talk about how we descend the scale again. We basically pick the same notes as before again, but we’re gonna add some pull-offs to this. As you can see, there is not one upstroke in the second bar. So the pattern worked really well for this part of the scale.
Now what I want you to do next is to simply hammer from the D into C when you repeat this scale and cycle. So the last note of the cycle, the D, you pick again with a downstroke and hammer into the first note C. This way you will avoid picking another downbeat and you should already notice a little boost in this right-hand flow.
Then try to repeat this in a loop! So we are only left with actually one upstroke now on E, which will feel like in a way like a little stumbling block. This should give you already a little hint of how that flow feels like, once you're in it.
Let’s try out the same notes just an octave higher. The picking directions and movement will be exactly identical:
You don’t necessarily always have to start from the root. You could also start anywhere else within this C major scale or any other scale. If you would start playing from the G# and only descend to the note E, you could play this inverted picking flow in a loop without ever having to use any downstroke anymore. This will really make you feel this flow:
Now practice these warm up exercises first before you start working on your first Pat Metheny guitar transcription. It will help you develop more fluency and will get you closer to his sound.
You can download the free PDF with all the warm up exercises right here:
We will keep working on more Pat Metheny techniques on this blog. But before you move on, make sure to also check out my blog entry for Pat Metheny’s famous warmup footage.
If you ever wanted to have an amazing-sounding warmup exercise, you should definitely check this one out. It covers all the necessary techniques for you to get your hands warmed up without sounding too mechanical.
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