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How to be great at the guitar part 6 - Tapping

Rating: 0 user(s) have rated this lesson Posted by: ZixRyder, on Nov 03,2011, in category Guitar Techniques Views: this lesson has been read 804 times
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Do you remember the hammer-on and the pull-of technique? Well tapping is mostly the same but, you don’t hammer-on with your fretting hand, but with your picking hand. Here we have a little bit of personal preferences. I like to hold the pick between my thumb, and my index finger, some people like to hold it between the thumb and the middle, and so on. When I tap I use my middle finger, and I keep the pick in my hand. I don’t like to hold the pick with my mouth because that’s one extra move, but if you prefer tapping with your index finger, that’s fine to. It’s up to you as long as you doing it good.

Tapping is mostly showed with a T over the note. Now let’s look at some examples

---T--------T--------T--------T---------|
e|-12p5h8p5-12p5h8p5-12p5h8p5-12p5h8p5--|
B|--------------------------------------|
G|--------------------------------------|
D|--------------------------------------|
A|--------------------------------------|
E|--------------------------------------|

As you can see this one is a pretty simple tapping exercise. Try to do this with a metronome, and make sure two things: stay on the beat, and try to make every note ring out loud as possible. Here I can show you a little trick, when you want to remove your picking hand from the fretboard try to move your finger a little in any directions. Don’t just get your finger straight off from the string or you can’t make a decent pull-off to sound the next note. Also, do the tapping fast. Hit the sting hard, it will be louder. I like to mute the rest of the strings with resting my picking hand on the strings.
Now let’s see some more exercises. Every note in the exercises will be triplets.

---T--------T--------T--------T---------|
e|-15p10h12-15p10h12-15p10h12-15p10h12--|
B|--------------------------------------|
G|--------------------------------------|
D|--------------------------------------|
A|--------------------------------------|
E|--------------------------------------|

---T--------T--------T--------T---------|
e|-15p10h12-17p10h12-15p10h12-17p10h12--|
B|--------------------------------------|
G|--------------------------------------|
D|--------------------------------------|
A|--------------------------------------|
E|--------------------------------------|

You see what I did there? I changed the tapping. Every second tap is on a different note. Because I am resting my hand on the guitar I can’t really make position changing, so to do this I will use two finger of my picking hand, the middle and the ring finger. For the 15 notes I will use my middle finger and for the 17 notes my ring finger.
Try to master every exercises on ever string, but mostly on the 1st 2nd 3rd (e, B, G) strings.

Next time I will cover the proper form of sweep picking/arpeggio and we’re pretty close to the end of the series.
ZixRyder

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