SEPARATE VOICINGS WITH TWO-HANDED TAPPING:
Now for the fun part-- the part that really allows you to fill out your playing. Here, the left hand will do one voice while the right hand does another, much the way a piano player would play two voicings. It really gives the impression of 2 instruments, and therefore can add some nice depth to your playing. Let's start with the right hand first, just a basic Emajor scale:
exercise 7 (right hand, Emajor scale)
The next exercise is the left hand part for the same tune. It's very simple, just a series of hammer-ons and pull-offs:
exercise 8 (left hand pattern)
The next step is to put exercises 7 and 8 together. The trick is getting your left hand started, disconnect it from your brain, and simultaneously go for the right hand:
exercise 9 (exercises 7 and 8 together)
Did you get it? Remember, don't go too fast, and be careful to keep the two separate voices as distinct as possible.
The next exercise adds a bit more to exercise 9. It's the same bass line with the right hand, but the left hand is quite a bit more interesting in that it uses more tapping patterns. Musically, I prefer the simplicity of exercise 9 to exercise 10, but I encourage you to learn exercise 10 as it will help you to gain greater independence of your two hands, as well as learn some different tapping patterns that you can use in your own compositions, where a slightly more complex phrase might sound better than a simple one.
exercise 10:
PUTTING THINGS TO WORK:
"THE DUTCHMAN"I think we're ready for a song. This is one of my favorites-- I made the guitar part back in college, and adopted the words from a brilliantly poetic folk song called, "The Dutchman" by Chicago folk-singer Michael Smith (not to be confused with Christian performer Michael W. Smith). The song is really simple, so it's a good way to start.
The tapping simply outlines the chords G-C-D7-Em, and an Am in the chorus. Actually, I tap on the major sevenths and sixths of those chords, so technically the chords are more like GM7-CM7add9-D7add6-Emadd6, but I don't want to lose anybody here. This is the main lick of the song:
exercise 11 (motif for
"The Dutchman")
When I play this song live, sometimes I play both left and right hand parts of exercise 11 with just my left hand, and at the same time play a second acoustic guitar with my right hand. But here's a nice arrangement for one guitar that's been recorded on the cassette that's included with this book:
exercise 12
("The Dutchman")Intro-Verse-Chorus
TAPPING CHORDS:
Tapping chords with your right hand can be pretty tough, especially with the problems of overtones (see OVERTONES). Also, if you use your nails to pick, they can really get in the way. Because of these difficulties, I usually don't tap entire chords, and often I just tap the root and fifth (the "power chord" idea). If you're really crafty, you can swing this in standard tuning, but I find it really hard to get my ring finger to the fifth without missing 20% of the time. I prefer to tune the second string from an A up to a B, or to use drop-D tuning to keep the root-fifth interval accessible without needing to reach to another fret.
Here's a simple but tasty exercise. You'll have to tune your fifth string up to B, but otherwise it's standard tuning:
exercise 13
(tuning EBDGBE: separate voicings with a power chord)
Another way I tap chords with the right hand is by playing strictly R-7-3 inversions, which are easily accessible with the right hand, and have a nice jazzy/blues feel. In figure E and figure F, you can see these simple chord shapes in standard progressions. I use the chords in figure E to play "A Goldfish and an Eel" from my CD, "Paper Flowers". The shapes found in figure F outline the chords for an old song of mine, "Sunshine", shown in exercise 14.
As you can see in the chord charts of figures E and F, the fifth and sixth strings are left open, making it possible to tap out a simple lead with the left hand.
Between chords, I slap the palm of my right hand pretty hard against the neck of the guitar. The rhythm isn't very complex, it's just a matter of chord-backbeat-chord-backbeat as the right hand bounces from finger tips to palm like a bucking bronco. Accenting the backbeats fills out the pretty dead sound you get when tapping chords on an acoustic guitar. If you don't need to fill out the rhythm section in your playing (like if you're jamming with a percussionist or something), then you can leave the slap part out, although I've included it in the exercise:
exercise 14
("Sunshine")
In measure XXX I added some arpeggios to break the monotony of the chord-slap pattern. Those arpeggios can be used over any FM7 chord (bar XXX) or any 7th chord (bar XXX). Bars XXX on the left hand take advantage of the open B and E strings, which always sound nice if you're laying down licks in Emajor or Eminor.
TAPPING WITH OPEN STRINGS:
Until now, all the tapping has been in standard tuning. The way that I tap involves pulling off to open strings much of the time, which I think adds a great tone/arpeggio/pivot note to guitar playing. Some other guitarists who use tapping don't take advantage of open strings, and use primarily hammer-ons and few pull-offs (Stanley Jordan, Joe Satriani in "Midnight" and "At the Beach").
If you tap and don't want to use open strings, you can solve your overtone problem by using a damper (see OVERTONES). By not using open strings, you're not as chained to keeping the open strings in the same key as the songs you're playing. Limiting the keys that you can play in can be a real disadvantage to using open strings.
Using open strings all the time in standard tuning can get really monotonous really fast. The other chapters concerning alternate tuning and third-hand capos offer some solutions to this problem (simply snapping a capo on the second fret which raises all your open strings up a whole step isn't a very good solution, because you'll still tend to use the open strings with the same intervals). Hopefully the exercises in this chapter will get you to feel comfortable with tapping in a good ol' familiar standard tuning, after which you can venture into new unfamiliar tunings and really hear some of the sounds tapping can offer.
If open tunings scare you, well, I hope what you've learned up to this point will add some depth to your playing, electric or acoustic.
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