We begin with a very special technique that I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about, or already know: Tapping. This technique is used by many guitarists, and surely by many of your favorites. It was born back in the ’70s, but there is some doubt as to who used it first. Some say it was Steve Hackett, guitarist of Genesis, in his early days, and others say it was Van Halen, on their first album, who brought it to the surface and went on to develop it.
Personally, my first exposure to this technique was through the latter, Van Halen... but since we’re getting practical here, we’ll leave the controversy aside.
Thanks to the Internet, we have a wide variety of examples of guitarists who use it, and we can watch them play it in videos on their websites. We can see, among many others, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Van Halen, among the veterans; but there is also a current wave of guitarists who use it, such as Dave Martone, Guthrie Govan, Greg Howe and T.J. Helmerich, among many others, and you can add plenty more guitarists I haven’t named, quite possibly including some of your favorites; and you can even count yourself in as a guitarist who is interested in this great technique or already uses it.
Why use Tapping
If you’re not in that camp and haven’t felt curious about this great technique, I’ll tell you that you don’t have to know it, since you can do an awful lot, or nearly everything you set out to do, without it, but I’m going to give you a few reasons to change your mind:
- It’s not one of the most difficult techniques, although of course you have to put in the time.
- It can make certain situations easier for you in your band as a pro, making them more comfortable with this technique.
- It’s a resource that really kills in the studio, but above all live.
- There can be situations where it’s the only way to play certain groups of notes.
- Tapping can include a melodic part in which certain expressions can only be achieved through it (and we’ll show this in some of the practical exercises during these chapters).
So, as you can see, there are many reasons to study this technique, which will without a doubt bring you a lot of satisfaction.
Position and technique
Let’s start by talking about the playing position for this technique. You have to be careful with the hand that holds the pick and, from a relaxed position, make sure that when you rest your forearm on the area where you’ll be tapping, you don’t move it, since that would produce very annoying noises. Once your arm is in place in the practice area, the tapped notes are played with a slight movement of the wrist. Another important point is not to wear anything bothersome on your wrists, so you know the drill: off with anything that could get in the way, such as watches, bracelets, etc.
Normally, for good execution of this technique, with the hand that will do the tapping, and which for now will keep holding the pick, you should rest the part of the forearm closest to the elbow against the body of the guitar, above the strings, without making any of them pop or click. With your forearm you’ll end up in a situation similar to muting the strings, but without actually doing it, although this will go a long way toward keeping your guitar’s sound clean. You’ll come to this setup naturally, little by little, as you practice the exercises. At first, I recommend keeping your amp volume low, but with a generous amount of distortion to make the legato easier. If you remember, in the last chapter of “developing your technique” I hinted that the “hammer-on and pull-off” exercises would have a lot to do with everything we’re discussing now; after all, they have a lot in common (at first), the difference being that the pick attack in most of the exercises will be replaced by tapping, which appears in the score with the letter T.
You’ll notice that many guitarists who use this technique wear a sort of “capo” on the neck of the guitar. This “gadget” acts as a mute and is usually used for tapping exercises or solos where it’s necessary to mute the strings, since the difficulty of execution is high and the string jumps the guitarist makes are such that open strings could ring out that shouldn’t and mustn’t sound. In fact, there will be strings where the only note produced will be the one you tap; in any case, this mute only dampens the sound, it never actually plays a string. In these first exercises you won’t just not need it, you won’t use it, among other reasons because some of them include open-string notes and, in others, the index finger of the fretting hand will somehow keep certain strings from ringing when they shouldn’t. So we’ll leave the use of this device for later. Let’s get to the heart of the matter: the exercises.
Tapping on the first string (1)
Almost everything has been said in the explanation above as far as execution goes, so if you have any doubts I suggest you review it. You’ll see in this first exercise that all the patterns repeat in the score. I did it this way so you can practice reading the score/tab and not get lost. It’s a simple exercise on the first string of the guitar, in which you’ll need to get a fuller sound and accent the first note of each measure.
Tapping on the first string (2)
In this particular exercise, you’ll see that the tapping always repeats at the twelfth fret. What’s different about the other hand compared with the previous exercise is that it will travel the neck from the open string to the 12th fret. You’ll also see that the speed is higher. If you managed to play the first one well, go ahead with this one.
Tapping on the pentatonic scale
Now on to the most difficult exercise in this installment, and one that calls for special care. It’s a pentatonic scale with tapping. So far, so normal: as you’ll see, the ascending part is all clear (including the fact that we’re already using this technique on several strings), but the descending part is quite peculiar and more complex; the way we do the tapping will change. Notice that when we descend, the first note, which we would normally tap, will be played with the fingers of the other hand, and then we continue with the one that would be tapping. And not only that: when we reach the sixth string we’ll use only the fretting hand, which adds a bit more difficulty to the exercise.
Take special care to keep this exercise clean, and try not to use (even though there are no open strings) the mute we talked about for damping the strings. So let’s get to this exercise.
In the next chapter we’ll tackle more and more complex exercises, with more notes per string and more difficulty for “both sides of the brain.” This is only the beginning. Until the next installment.
