I am BACK on YouTube with a new lesson introducing guitar tapping. This was inspired by listening to a lot of Paul Gilbert recently. He likes a good tapping lick or three!

What is guitar tapping? It's an articulation technique popularised by Eddie Van Halen (check out ‘Eruption’ on Van Halen’s debut album) which allows us to play arpeggio and other scale patterns across wide areas of the neck.

Arpeggios on one string go beyond the reach of the fretting hand, so we can add in the picking hand to activate notes higher up the neck by tapping the fretboard. You can use the index or middle finger to do this.

After we tap the fretboard we then need to pull and flick off the string to activate a lower note. In the tapping exercises here we start with flicking off to the open string, but we can fret any note below the fret we are tapping and flick off to hear it.

Things get really fun when we start to add a third (and even fourth) note. In this lesson we are working with triplet rhythms (in the style of Eruption). The fretting hand will hammer onto a higher fret to give us a third note (tap-flick-tap).

The key to master guitar tapping is developing the hammer and pull off techniques is both the picking hand and the fretting hand. I've provided exercises that will help to develop the strength in both hands for accurate, clean tapping technique.

You can get guitar tabs for the tapping exercises and the backing track for the study by supporting me on my Patreon page.