Easy Tapping Lick Using Legato and Open Strings

Hi everybody. This is Darrin Goodman from guitarcontrol.com bringing you this video lesson today. Today I want to show you a cool little – it’s more of an exercise than I would say is a lick, but it uses tapping with some open strings and it just kind of follows-up the notes in the scale. Be sure to click on the link in the description for the tabs and let’s get to it. The reason that I kind of came up with this, I had students that were having problems with tapping, with hammer-ons and pull-offs and stuff and then when playing on a single string, keeping the other strings quiet. So this is kind of a way to kill many birds with one stone. To start off with, we’re going to be tapping on the 12th fret of the 1st string. In fact, this entire sequence we’re playing is on single strings. We’re going to start off with just playing it on the first string alone. With the tapping finger I actually pluck the string and then I’m going to do a hammer-on to the 4th, 5th and then 7th frets. Then I’m going to follow that with tapping the 12th fret. Now I’m going to pull-off the tapping note and I’m going to pull-off to the 7th fret, then I’ll pull from the 7th to the 5th, from the 5th to the 4th and from the 4th to the open string. I’m just going to do that repetitively and what we’re going to be doing is moving up the positions each time we do it. So the first sequence is frets 4, 5 and 7 and then tap the 12th fret. Next we’re just simply going to move from this position of 4, 5 and 7 to 5, 7 and 9 and we’re going to continue to tap the 12th fret. Now we’re going to move up again and we’re going to be fretting 7, 9 and 10, but we’re going to move our tapping finger to the 14th fret. Now we’re going to move up to the next position, which is 9, 10 and 12 and we’re going to tap the 15th fret. Now we’re just simply going to descend back down the sequence. When you’re playing this you do not want to hear these other strings making noise. So whenever you tap anything like this just take your right hand, your picking hand, and just rest it – so I’m just taking the palm of my hand and I’m just resting it on these other strings so that way they don’t start making noise on their own. I would recommend practicing this with a metronome so that way when you’re – it’ll force you that when you switch positions that you don’t miss any time with it. After you get to where you can do that pretty good, just move it to the 2nd string and you can just do the same exact thing. And then so on and so forth. You can move it to the 3rd string, the 4th string. So each time you change to different strings it’s going to force you to have to – the angle of your hand is going to be different; you’re going to have to move your hand where you’re muting down. Now, when you’re playing on the lower strings, you can’t very well palm mute the – keep the other strings quiet with your right hand. So what I simply do with this hand is I just let my fingers kind of droop over to try to keep them quieter. It is a lot harder to mute higher strings than it is the lower strings because you’re fretting notes that are one the strings that are below the strings that you’re trying to mute, so it does take a considerable amount of practice. I hope you enjoyed that. Be sure to click on the link in the description for the tabs and until next time…