Guitar Heat

Welcome to Guitar Heat Lessons- I hope you have a good time RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

One of the most widely used methods in modern rock is Tapping. It is basically a combination of hammer-ons and pull offs. For those who dont know about these, hammer on is basically plucking the string once and playing two notes where the second note is higher to the first one and pull of is playing two notes where the second one is at a lower fret as compared to the first note. Hammer-ons and pull-offs are formally referred to as “slurs” in music theory.

In tapping we do slurs with our picking hand and we don’t pluck the string at all. We use the force of the string hitting the fret to cause the string to vibrate.well. For example this excercise

D|-5h7p5h7p5h7p5h7p5h7

Where h stands for hammer-on and p stands for pull off. What happens in this excercise is that you press the note(5th) from your first finger and use your middle finger to hammer. You can also use your picking hand instead of the fretting hand.I suggest using your middle finger because this allows you to hold your pick between your thumb and index finger as you normally would so that you can switch from a picking riff to a tap without letting go of your pick.

Other way of doing this is by using the right hand along with the left, in this there are three notes involved instead of two. Like for example if you try to play “Crazy Train” solo by late Randy Rhoads, you will have to use the above technique to play that solo.

Tapping allows us to do triplets or quadruplets over a very large range of notes on the fret board, where normal slurs would be either very difficult or in some cases impossible. We don’t have to pull offs after the tap. In this example we simply tap and release. The tap itself is a pull of. So we just play two notes at a time rather than three:

E|-t12p7-t12p8-t12p10-t12p8-t12p7-t12p5-t12p3-t12p5–
B|—————————————————————————-

I will be back with more exclusive tapping lessons and theory. Make sure to check out our homepage to download free books and videos by guitar gurus.

Popularity: 37% [?]