Steve Rieck: So what I want to do is talk about what most people refer to as Lenny Breau style harmonics, Lenny Breau is an incredible jazz guitar player than really popularized this sound. He did it a way better than almost any one. But the concept is really about a certain right hand technique. What I am going to do is I am going to hold a fairly straightforward chord here. It has got a fancy name that's going to be F sharp minor9 chord, actually F sharp minor11, with a nine.
But really all it is just a barred, first finger across the second fret. Then I am going to put my fourth finger on the fourth fret of the first string. So it makes just kind of a jazzy chord there. The idea with this technique is that I am going to use the right hand harmonic technique that we talked about previously, but I am not going to do harmonics on every string. So in this case, I am going to pick the fourth string open with the third finger and notice I am not doing harmonic, so the note E comes out.
If I go down to the sixth string and play a harmonic, I have got to use the thumb to pluck that note to you get F sharp. Notice how this F sharp is a harmonic. It sounds an octave higher. So basically what that did is it created rather than going E, F sharp, it sounds like E, F sharp, going up a step F sharp. So practice that a few times and then all we are going to do is just apply that instead of to the fourth and sixth string than to third and fifth string, to the second and fourth string, to the first and third string.
So we go, no harmonic, harmonic, without a harmonic, then with, without, with, without and with. So you get. So if you alternate the last two strings at the end, and it just changes up a little bit. Like that, so it's just a neat little technique to get down. If thought about the notes that that actually created on this F sharp chord E, F sharp, A, B and then C sharp, E, G sharp A. or if you change the strings around A, G sharp, so it sounds like you are going.
So it makes this kind of ascending scale sound where you have some of the notes being harmonics, and other ones not. So that's a really useful technique and it also looks cool which is always important. So that's 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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