Steve Rieck: The next harmonic technique I want to talk about is a little more advanced and this is basically where we are going to use one hand to pretty much create the whole process. The right is going to do the whole process of harmonics. What I mean by that is when you play a regular open harmonic, you are pretty much limited to whatever the open strings are, so if you have an E you can play obviously all the harmonics we have discussed around the E string or around the E note, but let's say I was fretting may be the third fret on the first string, and that's a G.
So I could look at this the same way. The vibrating length of the string is going to be from the bridge, in this case to the third fret. So the half way point of that would be actually over the fifteenth fret. So it stands the reason, that should be one octave harmonics of the G right there. Now without another hand I will have to do this. So what I am doing is actually just tucking the pick away.
Now if you are using the pick in the second finger like this, using the first finger, pointing the first finger out to basically create what the left hand was doing earlier. So the first thing is actually responsible for being over the fret itself on the string and then the third finger in this case is actually picking the string. So that's something you want to practice slowly if you are not familiar with that concept. So let's say I just took a basic chord like a G chord.
All I am doing is tracing the shape of that chord, one octave higher. Notice, I am also getting my thumb down here to just keep it supported until you might want to do that, some guys do it, some guys don't but -- so that's just a basic one octave harmonic there. Now let's say I would just do that as a practice exercise with each of the open chords. I will take a C chord and I am, in this case, just playing each of the notes of the C chord slowly with that harmonic technique.
Then of course you have to hold the C chord in open position to get that happen. So that's the 15 to 14, 12, 13, 12, 13, 12, 14 back to the 15 fret. So, if I did that with the rest of the open chord, same concept G, D, A and E and of course you could take that even further into scales and things like that as well. So that's right hand harmonics.
Erik Mongrain: Hi, I am Erik Mongrain and today I am going to try and show you how to play the lap-tapping. Point here is, this technique is mostly improvisation. For me I would say 75% improvisation and 25% structures.
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