Pat Metheny's Guitar Technique - Part II
How’s it been going so far with inverting the picking directions in your right hand?
If you have not checked out PART I of this blog, please make sure to check that out first because we are going to continue building everything up from the previous blog before we’re going to cover an actual solo of Pat. You can find PART I right here.
So in the last blog we talked about switching the picking directions in your right hand. Now let’s talk about Pat Metheny’s left hand for a little bit. Now, most people will point out his famous technique where he descends down the neck in thirds and it sounds almost as if you are falling down the stairs. It’s a great way to connect ideas all across the fretboard, so let’s have a closer look at this.
Alright, so let’s get into the descending 3rds of Pat. You can find this phrase in one of these seminar videos on youtube. You can find the link to the video right here.
It’s a good example because it’s not an actual song of his but basically, just him simply warming up and you can see him playing some of his trademark techniques. The camera is also zoomed in on this a lot, so we can really see what’s happening.
I’m pretty sure he thinks Bb Lydian starting from the 5th scale degree here. You can already see here in the first bar, how everything we did in the previous video, where we inverted all the right-hand picking directions, applies to these first notes already. So everything is the opposite, if possible you want to avoid picking the downbeats and use as many slurs and hammer-ons / pull-offs and play downstrokes on the upbeats. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please check out PART I.
When we get to the second bar, we start with an upstroke because it’s the downbeat. The next note D on the third string you are going to do a “Hammer-on” from nowhere. This Hammer-on from nowhere we will cover in a second, so let’s just keep going….
Once we get to the major 7th of the chord on beat 3, this is where I would say is our starting point for the descending thirds and the chromaticism kicks in. So you pluck the Ab, pull off to G right next to it, then Hammer-on from nowhere the Eb on the 5th string below and then repeat this pattern until you reach F on the 4th string. This would be the 5th of the Bb△7chord, so we land on a stable sounding note.
As you have probably noticed by now with this descending thirds lick is that from the group of two notes: the lower note is always Hammerd-on from nowhere. Same technique as we found for the one note at the beginning at the beginning of the second bar. The higher note of these descending thirds groupings, Pat usually plays with downstrokes.
Now I’ve seen footage of him playing the higher note of these two actually with upstrokes, so I guess we can’t really make a rule for this descending thirds lick but as long as you hammer the lower note, you should be fine catching all of these notes with no big effort. It also depends on what comes after this lick in a real solo situation and how he connects this with other ideas. But for now, just remember to always pluck the higher note and hammer-on from nowhere the lower note.
Now the hammer-on from nowhere that we encountered at the beginning of the bar is also something that you will find all over the place in his solos. You don’t always obviously have to go the full distance with this motion. A Hammer-on from nowhere is an even “smaller fragment” of this descending thirds lick. This you can use at anytime and anywhere before playing your target note on your solos. It’s very subtle but it will sometimes buy you that extra little millisecond to catch the next phrase.
Let’s have maybe one more example lick for these “hammer-ons from nowhere”. So this one you can find on the tune “Son Of Thirteen” and it takes place kind of at the end of the solo. All of this is played over Dm7 or Dm△7 and borrows from the D melodic minor scale. But you could of course use this also over a regular Dm7 chord. But I won’t go too much into the note and scale choices here since we are on the topic of technique:
So you play the minor 3rd, then the 9th on top, back to the minor 3rd and then hammer-on from nowhere on the major 7th.
The last one is an easy one. So until now, I told you to invert everything and play most of Pat Metheny’s phrases the opposite way. Now just remember that if a phrase starts with two or more consecutive sixteenth notes on one string, he usually switches back to alternate picking for a second.
This is where you want to quickly switch back to conventional picking because there is nothing to pull-off or hammer into so it just wouldn’t make sense to invert anything here. So in these cases, keep everything normal for a short period of time.
Just as a quick example, this would be a phrase from his tune “At Last You’re Here”. You can see the first 4 notes of the second bar being all on the same string. This is where we break our rule of inverting everything and you would have to switch to regular alternate picking.
So this one you don’t really have to practice but it’s definitely important to notice and something to get ready for when you want to practice and work on a Pat Metheny solo.
Alright, I think we have now looked at enough guidelines to finally work on an actual solo of Pat. So let’s have a little summary of all the things you should have in your toolbox before jumping into a Pat Metheny guitar transcription:
Inverted Right-Hand Picking
Inverted right-hand picking for busier parts, where we pluck upbeats ideally with downstrokes and also avoid picking downbeats by using slurs, hammer-ons, and pull-offs.
Use Upstrokes For Melodious Passages
Use a lot of upstrokes for melodious passages, especially on the first and second strings.
Descending Thirds
The descending thirds movement where we always use the “hammer-on from nowhere” for the lower note.
Single Hammer-Ons From Nowhere
Use short, single Hammer-ons from nowhere to connect ideas.
Switch To Alternate Picking
Use alternate picking when a phrase starts with two or more consecutive sixteenth notes on one string.
So let’s put them into action and see how they all work and function together in an actual solo of his.
Let`s work step by step through a few solos of his together in the next blogs so that you can do this in the future by yourself with the Solos of Pat Metheny . So I will see you next entry!
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