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Two-hand tapping
The picking hand frets the neck too.
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Until now each hand had its own trade: one frets, the other attacks. breaks that division of labour: the picking hand also comes down onto the neck and frets notes with one finger, as if the guitar were a small keyboard. That lets you play huge intervals on a single string, arpeggios that would be impossible with one hand, and bursts of notes with an almost electronic fluency. The technique is simple to understand and demanding to clean up: the challenge, once again, is noise.
Listen to this cell repeated on the 2nd string. Three slurred notes per beat, without a single pick stroke:
How each note is produced:
t in the tab): a finger of your right hand strikes the string at fret 12 (B) and holds it down.Three notes: B, E, G. In other words, an Em triad played on a single string.
There are two schools, both valid:
Middle finger, pick in hand
You hold the pick as usual, between thumb and index, and tap with the middle finger. Advantage: you can go from tapping back to picking without letting go of anything. This is the most common option in rock.
Index finger, pick tucked away
You hide the pick by curling the index or park it between the middle and ring fingers, and tap with the index, which is stronger and more accurate. Advantage: more control. Drawback: getting back to the pick takes a moment.
Whichever finger you use, three details:
In tapping both hands are on the neck and neither rests on the strings in its usual place. So, without care, every tap sets off neighbouring and open strings. The fixes:
The three-note cell changes chord by moving its three frets. On the 2nd string the triad always uses its highest note as the tap:
| Chord | Tap | Pull-off to | Hammer-on to | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Em | 12 | 5 | 8 | B, E, G |
| C | 13 | 5 | 8 | C, E, G |
| G | 15 | 8 | 12 | D, G, B |
| D | 15 | 7 | 10 | D, F♯, A |
Notice how little everything moves: from Em to C only the tap changes, by one fret. This kind of smooth connection, with shared notes, is what makes tapped arpeggios sound so fluid.
The left hand changes shape every bar while the right keeps tapping. The critical moment is the chord change: the left hand has to reach the new position before the tap, because the pull-off lands on it immediately.
The tap-pull-hammer cell naturally produces triplets: three notes per beat. If you add one more pull-off at the end (from the hammer-on back to the lower note), you get four notes per beat, that is, sixteenths:
Hear the difference in feel: triplets roll, sixteenths move forward in blocks of four. Switching between them at will is a great rhythmic control exercise:
The next step is to spread the arpeggio over two strings. The left hand frets fret 12 on the 1st string with the index and fret 13 on the 2nd with the middle finger; the right hand taps fret 17 on both. Every note belongs to Am: A, E, C and E.
Watch the string changes: the left hand enters the 2nd string with a and returns to the 1st the same way. That's where noise appears, because the string you just left keeps vibrating. The fix is for the finger leaving it to ease off without lifting away, and for the tapping finger's pull-off not to brush the neighbouring string. Practise this example very slowly: it's the gateway to the multi-string tapped arpeggios you'll hear in instrumental rock.
Once the basic cell is solid there are many extensions: tapping with two fingers of the right hand (middle and ring) to play two high notes; spreading the arpeggio across several strings, tapping on one and slurring on another; or very fast tapped trills between a right-hand note and a left-hand note. They all use the same principles: quick taps, plucked pull-offs and total muting.
Play the E minor cell (tap 12, pull-off 5, hammer-on 8) in triplets. Start at 60 BPM. Every time you hear noise, stop, find it and correct the hand responsible. Go up 4 BPM only when the silence between notes is total.
Goal: Two straight minutes of E minor triplets without any open-string noise.
Play the four bars of the example over the backing. Before each change, look at the next left-hand position. If a change fails, practise just that pair of bars for a minute.
Goal: Four consecutive cycles of Em, C, G, D without missing a single chord change.
One bar of triplets (tap-pull-hammer) and one of sixteenths (tap-pull-hammer-pull). Count out loud "1-trip-let" and "1-e-and-a" to feel the switch.
Goal: Alternate one bar of triplets and one of sixteenths four times in a row without losing the beat.
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