Tapping? Going beyond the old one string arpeggios

Not boring at all, but cut that string at the headstock, it will take your eye out! :grin:

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Are you playing straight into that Cube amp?

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That’s right! Just the cube with a bit of delay.

Sounds good!

I tried playing that piece you shared the tab for, it’s very difficult. If I had my guitar tuned down a whole step I would probably find it a bit easier.

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Thank you!
Yeah I took MANY MANY hours getting this down. I just took it in 4 note chunks (see, I did listen to Troy! Haha!) I also wrote it deliberately with no open strings so I could use a hairband. I don’t want to worry about muting as WELL as all that tapping nonsense!

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I don’t do a ton of tapping in my own stuff but I just remembered doing this little string skipper towards the end of one of my solos from the upcoming Gatekeeper record. I took this video the week before recording it last year. Nothing crazy but I was stoked that I was able to pull it off at all since it’s outside of my usual bag.

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Yikes, took me a while to get back to this thread, but thanks for the cool links and resources.

@qwertygitarr that was a pretty killer clip, very clean and yeah the technique gives you smooth access to some much bigger intervals

@TheCount also very cool. I too like to pop things into GP and start moving note locations around to see what is playable in different ways…you can really utilize your strengths doing this.

@Dissonant_Timbres oooo yeah good old Dragonforce, haha! I don’t hear much about them these days. But I did always think they did a good job of putting shred stuff into fun, accessible music. That Vito Bratta solo is great, cool that it seems to be using tapping much more to get a certain articulation with larger intervals rather than just building speed on a fast run.

@aliendough that fusion stuff is cool too. You can get some really interesting, wide interval jazz type vocabulary going.

I can’t help but think that I big reason some of this tapping stuff isn’t more popular is just because of how it looks, hah. There’s something sort of counter-triumphant about the way the physical movement comes across in a performance, and I think the association with the hair metal stuff is hard to shake.

Anyway, inspiring stuff all, thank you. There’s a definitely a whole world in here. I also really like the idea that tapping even just a note here or there can help problem solve the arrangement of a line that is difficult to play or pick.

I arranged this keyboard part from Anomalie Beats for guitar and found tapping to be the most logical approach given the wide range and speed of the line.

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Hi Jake, I’m late to the thread, but I’ll add that I find it interesting that for many of us, the “wow” of two-handed tapping hid the immediate utility of left-hand-only tapping as an alternative to other techniques. Your question is an interesting one as it begs the question, when is two handed musically essential? Thanks for exploring it.

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I think tapping in conjunction with bending is super underrated. It’s a great effect because it can be used so subtly. One of my favorites is the little lick at the end of the Larry Carlton’s solo in Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne” at about 3:05.

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Just getting into this Tapping technique- I’ve known it has existed for a long time but have just never attempted it. I love the liquid like Sound (much like a saxophone) that it produces- a nice contrast to the machine gun tone of Picking everything.

I’m starting with those Single String Triads/Arpeggios just using my middle finger to tap (currently tucking my pick in my index finger leaving the other 3 for available legato use).

Are there any technical videos or Instructionals (for purchase?) you guys have that show the proper hand/arm position when tapping (single and multi finger tapping)?

I’m aware that the actual technique is just Hammer Ons (from Nowhere) and Pull Offs (although there seem to be two approaches to Tapping Pull Offs, some do the standard method of curling the finger in, while others extend their finger and actually flick)

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Here’s a great course from someone who uses tapping in a very unique way. I got this a while back it’s very well structured, almost like learning drum rudiments, it starts really simple and gets very complex. Recommended.

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… and here’s a video showing him using the techinques in his own music, love this stuff, like Danny Elfman on guitar :slight_smile:

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This interests me - using tapping to make a precomposed passage easier to play:

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Awesome playing!

Now it’s my turn to ask a n00b question. When you say “eight finger” do you mean all eight are being used, or just that all eight are available if needed, i.e. for some phrases and not others?

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The term eight finger tapping I guess was invented to make an impression of complexity. I’m not sure whom I got it from. I thought of it as just a name for using more than one finger on the right hand. And for me it was almost never more than two at a time. Three when doing chromatics. So I guess a more truthful name would be two-, three- or four-finger tapping.

All fingers was used though. The pinky was hard but not to bad when you got the hang of it. I could never get the coordination between right hand ring and pinky though. So most of what I played with the right hand was index to one of the other fingers.

Some players plays a lot more complex stuff with the right hand like Helmerich and Broderick. But I just wanted speed so to me it made more sense to do as easy movements as possible to achieve whatever goal.

Speaking of eight-fingered tapping:

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Awesome! That sounds great.

Markus Reuter around 1:10 in the video. Probably the best touch style or tapping player today

A local music shop had one of those used in stock and they let me give it a shot. Goddamn, I’ve never been so totally disoriented on an instrument, lol. It was kind of fun anyway though.

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Another great example