Welcome back! I want to show you a great way to play fast guitar licks.
I feel you! I’ve been there; Fast guitar licks are so hard to play. It takes so much practice to just
master the picking technique, and then on top of that you have to coordinate your right hand
with your left hand! Well, I’m here to show you a way to play fast chops, that is gonna make you
sound like you’ve been jamming on your guitar for quite some time. Let’s face it, we all play in a
band or jam with friends and wanna show off some cool fast licks; it’s just cool.
So let’s get down to it. The technique I’m talking about, that is gonna help you play fast licks
without that much effort, is Tapping Arpeggios. You are probably familiar with Arpeggios by
now; the concept is very simple, just play the notes of a chord one after another one. You’ve
probably seen a lot of guitar players use the so called “sweep picking” technique, to arpeggiate
chords. I mean sure, it works, but it’s not as cool anymore. You know what’s cool though?
Tapping arpeggios, it rules.
Let me show you an example:
I’m using the “ > “ accent symbol as a “tapping” symbol. Now, the key part of this is to mute the
strings that you are not using, with your Index finger. Another very important thing here is that
you shouldn’t use your pick at all! that’s right, put your little plastic triangles away guys.
Let’s take the Em7 arpeggio as an example. You will:
● Tap the first note ( 7 ) with your left hand.
● Hammeron
from the first note ( 7 ) to the second note ( 10 ).
● Tap the third note ( 14 ) with your right hand.
● Tap the fourth note ( 7 ) with your left hand.
● Hammeron
from the fourth note ( 7 ) to the fifth note ( 9 ).
● Tap the sixth note ( 12) with your right hand.
● And so on..
It is very important that you put a lot of pressure when you first tap any note, otherwise it’ll
sound weak.
That’s all for today. I hope you enjoy this lesson and please remember to check out more articles.