Legato

The player achieves this through controlled wrist movements of the bowing hand, often masked or enhanced with vibrato.

In guitar playing (apart from classical guitar) legato is used interchangeably as a label for both musical articulation and a particular application of technique—playing musical phrases using the fretting hand to play the notes—using techniques such as glissando, string bending, hammer-ons and pull-offs instead of picking to sound the notes.

Some guitar virtuosos (notably Allan Holdsworth, Shawn Lane and Brett Garsed) developed their legato technique to the extent that they could perform extremely complex passages involving any permutation of notes on a string at extreme tempos, and particularly in the case of Holdsworth, tend to eschew pull-offs entirely for what some feel is a detrimental effect on guitar tone as the string is pulled slightly sideways.

There is a fine line between legato and two-hand finger tapping, in some cases making the two techniques harder to distinguish by ear.

This causes the initial transient from the attack and decay phases to sound only once for an entire legato sequence of notes.

In Western Classical vocal music, singers generally use it on any phrase without explicit articulation marks.