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Dynamics and accents within melodic lines are essential to making the lines swing and breathe --- particularly at fast tempos. "It's all about control," says Bailey, adding that a sure-fire way to cultivate control is to do a simple exercise she picked up from the late jazz guitarist Emily Remler. It goes like this: 

Play up a chromatic scale in a steady stream of eighth-notes, using a five-note melodic grouping (C, C#, D, D#, E; C#, D, D#, E, F; and so on). Use alternate picking, and accent the first note in each five-note group.

"What you're doing, " says Bailey, "is getting so you can accent either downstrokes or upstrokes at will. It's a great exercise for giving your lines more depth and dynamics. You can also develop your phrasing by thinking about the rise-and-fall cadences of everyday speech. Sometimes, I actually concentrate more on where the accents are then on the notes themselves." -- AL

"Traditional picking always puts you in danger of hitting the string with too much force, which cancels the string's energy and kills the tone,"  --- Bailey