There's a particular kind of guitar player who picks every single note like it personally owes them money. I was that player. Then I discovered legato, where you pick one note and let your fretting hand do the honest labour for the rest — and suddenly my picking hand was on a permanent coffee break while my left hand quietly aged ten years.
This clip is a short four-finger legato lick: one attack at the start, then nothing but hammer-ons and pull-offs flowing across all four fingers. It's a compact study for anyone chasing that smooth, connected, no-visible-effort sound — and yes, your pinky is invited, whether it wants to be or not.
How the four-finger legato lick actually works
The whole trick of legato is that you only pick the first note of a group. Every note after that is sounded by the fretting hand alone: a hammer-on when you're going up (slam a finger onto a higher fret so the string keeps ringing) and a pull-off when you're coming down (pluck the string sideways with the finger you're lifting off). Using all four fingers in one phrase forces the weakest link — your ring and pinky fingers — to produce the same volume as your index, which is where most legato falls apart. If note three is loud and note four is a shy little whisper, that's a strength and pressure problem, not a speed problem.
Here's the useful takeaway: practise this painfully slowly with a metronome and listen for even volume, not just correct notes. Keep your fretting fingers hovering close to the strings so hammer-ons travel a short distance, and let the pull-offs actually pluck rather than just lift. Nail the evenness first and the speed shows up on its own — it always does. If you want more of this, the same fretting-hand discipline powers everything from a fusion-flavoured Allan Holdsworth-style legato line to a brutal little pinky finger exercise, and it sits right next to string skipping in the big box of guitar techniques.
Grab the PDF and Guitar Pro file, loop it until your pinky either cooperates or unionises, and if these tabs save you some suffering, you can fund my strings (and my picking hand's early retirement) over on Patreon.