Free Video Guitar Lessons: Tapping

Hi, my name is Rowan Casey, and I am running a series of video guitar lessons online. Anyone can learn something from one of the video guitar lessons in this series, because I start at the beginner level, and continue on to advanced techniques.

This free video guitar lesson is about tapping. Tapping, as I explain in the free video guitar lesson above, is the art of playing notes with just the right hand on the guitar. Tapping was made popular by metal guitarists, such as Eddie Van Halen. Usually you would use your index finger to push down notes on the frets, but I have seen some more advanced tapping experts play with all of their fingers, which is quite hard to do.

The first scale on the guitar you should probably start trying to tap with is the tritonic scale. This was the scale covered in the last free video guitar lesson. The tritonic scale is made up of the notes of the major and minor chords. So, let's say you wanted to tap a basic E minor tritonic scale.

You could start by tapping the seventh fret of the E string, (the thin one is probably best), then pull it off so that the open E string rings out. Then with your left hand, hammer on to the third fret of the E string, then pull off to the open. This is a basic tritonic pattern in quarter notes, (or sixteenth notes). If you wanted to play the A minor scale, you would start from the twelth fret of the E string, then hammer off to the fifth fret, the A. Then the eighth, and then the fifth again.

You could play a similar style of tapping in triplets, as I explain in the video guitar lesson above, by tapping the twelfth, then the fifth, then the eighth frets, and repeating. It is not easy to explain everything involved in tapping in one lesson, but once you know the scales, and you know how to use your right hand to tap notes, you can experiment with different tapping formulas. In the video, I briefly show some other scales which could be tapped, like the blues scale.

You could also do tapping in a minor or major scale on the guitar, and I have covered just about all of the scales that you might use in on free video guitar lesson or another, but for me personally, I think that the tritonic scale is the best scale for tapping. I hope that this free video guitar lesson has helped you with tapping, and I hope that you will join me for the next guitar lesson on soloing techniques, which covers some of the formulas used in soloing, like two down, one up, in a particular scale. If you want to follow the whole series of my free video guitar lessons, remember my name, (Rowan Casey), or bookmark my hubpages profile, by clicking on my name.