Basic Two Handed Tapping

Hi, I am Stewart Bull from licklibrary.com and welcome to this lesson on two handed tapping. I am going to show you a lick that I have originally learned from Eddie Van Halen. It has been really fantastic for playing fast passages without too much trouble. Okay, what we are going to do is place the first finger of our left hand on the fifth fret B string. We are going to use the third finger of our left hand on the eight fret B string. You can also use your little finger and I sometimes use both. Then we are going to take the index finger of our right hand and we are going to slam it on the 12th fret bass string. What I do is I have this technique where I push the flexion down with my thumb and it goes in there. Some people put in their mouth, some people flick it away but that is what I do.

Okay and as you get better, you can actually use other fingers to tap as well but initially, we will just start with the first finger. So the way this lick is going to work, the first note that you are actually going to hear is going to be this tap, tap 12th fret bass string. So what we are going to do is put the first finger of our left hand on to the fifth fret bass string as we discussed before. We are then going to tap our index finger into that 12th fret B and then what we are going to do is basically push it towards the floor until it comes off with a note. You should feel a little bit of resistance on your finger. You do not want to be pushing it too far down, just enough so that it makes the first and second note. The first one being the tap and then the second one being the pull off of the exposed fifth fret bass string.

Immediately following that, we slam that third finger of our left hand on to that eight fret B and we have successfully played the lick one. Now what we are going to attempt to do is play this lick over and over again and hopefully that sounded like a nice tapping lick. Now, if you want to get a little bit more advanced on this, I am going to show you something where you can play along to a backing track. In this case, A minor and you can get some really nice fast passages when you are playing your solos. So what we are going to do is use that technique but we are going to move it around. This first finger is only going to play notes from the 12th fret and this hand is going to go down on what we call the A minor pentatonic scale.

So if we start at the top, it is going to be fifth to eight on the first string with the index finger playing 12 high A and we are going to move to the B string, fifth and eight and we are going to move to the G string. This time, it is going to be five and seven to the left hand. I am going to move to the D string and play five to seven. Remember, with this finger playing 12 overtime, move down to the A, five and seven with the left hand. We are going to come down to the final part, which is going to be five and eight in the left hand and then 12 within this part of the string. Let us have a little play with the backing track and let us see how it sounds like. Okay, hopefully you can see in here there is some really nice fast melodic passages that can be created with that relatively simple technique, have fun.


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