Jude Gold's Guitar Lesson on Galloping Harmonics

Jude Gold’s Guitar Lesson on Galloping Harmonics Okay, what’s happening? I’m Jude Gold here, director at GIT here at Musician’s Institute in Hollywood California. And I think what I want to tell you about today is this thing we have here that’s pretty cool. It’s called Open Counseling. It takes your 50 guitar teachers, every different style; blue, shred, metal, session cut, touring cut, TV cut, all here with the brooms open and I they sit in there, got amps, music stands. And you come in and you ask them about anything, about playing, about career, about what they do, about playing techniques, how to prepare for a gig, all this different stuff. And the reason I'm telling you tell about that is because I noticed when I do these open counseling sessions, a lot of the students ask me about this kind of slopiddy, spunkidy, full contact guitar thing that I do. I really kind of enjoy it. It’s funky but it’s kind of mixed with some hard rocks in distortion. It sounds good to your half stack. It sounds good with the touch of Van Halen in there and a touch of Primus and a touch of Chili Peppers or something mixed with little Marcus Miller bass or something. And you get a pretty funky sound. I want to show you some steps that you can do. I call it Galloping Harmonics. It starts really simple. And by the time you get the technique down, it ends really simple. And it’s a really fun thing you can do. And it starts with two notes. So, let’s look at figure one. Figure one we’re looking at the ninth fret of the fourth string and the seventh fret of the fifth string. In other words, a power fifth E5. Here we go, E5. But we’re going to play them separately. We’re going to play them like this, just for figure one. Just to make sure we got the technique down with the eighth note resting between each note. It’s easy, right? All down, starts with the pick. We’re going to lose the pick in a little while but for now, I want to show you how you can also use the pick in this stuff. Moving on the figure two, this is where the core of the lick happens. This is where we get into the Galloping Harmonics that I told you about. We’ll first, we’re going to get the gallop move down then we’re going to add the harmonics. The gallop move is as simple as doing figure one but here in figure two, adding a hammer on between each note as such, one, two, three, four. See what’s happening? We had this, but after each note, we’re anticipating the next note by hammering it on before the pick hits it. Then after hitting that note, hammer that note. So, all those notes from the two notes from figure one are now preceded by that same note hammered. Let’s expand that interval one fret and go back and forth and also double the speed. In other words, instead of two notes per beat, we’re going to have four notes per beat. In other words, we’re going to use 16 notes. Here comes figure three, one, two, three, four. I like this because you don’t have to be like a super fast chops monger to play this because you’re cheating with the hammer on. I’m all about cheating on the guitar. And I think it sounds good too when you get some hammered notes in there, it sounds looser. It’s not all stiff and mechanical. Get this kind of more of a flowing sound. You can actually play the step really fast here. I’ll break it down on a second. But look how fast you can play even when you’re not really a super fast guitar player. Again, it’s the same moves. Move it all a replay. Now, let’s move on to figure four. This is where we add the artificial harmonics. There are different ways to play artificial harmonics. Today, we’re going to play them with our thumb. In other words, we’re going to slap them. Van Halen made this technique famous with the index finger. Hit those notes exactly 12th frets higher, exactly on the fret this 12th frets higher not before they’re between the frets but on the fret and you get a harmonic. In other words, we take this note on the 4th string. It was a 7th fret, add 12th, go up to 19th Harmonic. This one was nine to 12 which is the 21st fret, 7th fret here is going to be a 19th fret, tapping the 19th fret, not really tapping but bouncing the finger off. What we’re going to do now is do that same thing with the thumb. What I’m going to do is keep my pick handy whenever I need it. You don’t have to do this, but what I do is I take that pick and I put it behind the third and fourth fingers, kind of tuck it in there. I got these power fingers right here at thumb, index, middle that we can use all kinds of slapping and popping techniques and other percussive stuff. And we’re going to use the thumb to kind of spunk that harmonic. The thumb is kind of to stiff but it’s loose, you’re swinging it from the wrist and it’s bouncing off the guitar. 12th frets higher, you bounce it off the fret board and you get the harmonic. You also get a big callus after a while if you mess around with this so start slow. Don’t split up in your thumb on this. Starts hurting and go back to the pick. See, we’re going to do that same thing with the thumb. We’ll get the harmonics. Harmonics are fun. They’re always nice. Get a little compression going if you’re playing clean, you want some compression or some sustain that will make the note scream distortion, which I have plenty of it right here to this half stack is by its own nature full of compression and heavily compressed. So, the harmonic will scream naturally. You shouldn’t have to use any extra compression. I missed the fret the first time which is why I didn’t hear the harmonic then up to the right position, you get it to scream out and it’s a lot of fun. You can add it to chords like let’s take for example, the E major chord. You know this chord right? Standard bar chord here at the 7th position. I like to take this technique and play kind of pretty stuff too. It doesn’t always have to be super—machine gun and kind of stuff. It can be pretty. Let’s move down to the C position for our final two licks. Here in figure five, we’re going to practice this technique and playing actual more than just fifth—but playing actual chords. We got that same bar chord, a very slappable bar chord, 12th frets higher. The first note would be the 3rd string, the 5th fret, and 12th frets higher is the 17th fret which gives us, right. We do the whole chord in this sequence. Here is figure five. You can play around to order the notes. Just break that down real slowly. Remember, this is the same exact technique as before, just throwing in extra colors by moving this finger around. So first, position it in active then we raise up a string with the third finger, same low note, and back to the 5th down here. We’re playing it in this sequence. Let’s look at our final example, Figure six, which is a little lick that I played on Trey Alexander’s new solo record. It’s kind of a country group and I was trying to think some different to play instead of trying to play some country licks. And it just really fit the chord changes. It’s kind of a C, F, G, C, kind of sound. Actually it has a suspension in there too. So, we get this kind of sound. Here’s figure six. That last harmonic is the highest string 8th fret. So, we got to hit the 20th fret up here, 12th frets higher. It’s kind of fun. Let’s play a real slowly. These are the positions, and then with the artificial harmonics and the hammer on. Always hard to play these things slow. I think I got it. Here it is, real slow. So, have fun with the step. Make up your own licks. You can always spunk your guitar 12th frets higher than what you’re playing and you should get a good sound. I like to take progressions and do it. As we fade here, maybe I’ll show you a little progression that I added my slap technique from a song called Swivel by Trevor Thompson, a great Southern California singer, song writer, and future rock star. Take these chords here. Super happy chords, too happy, right? Let’s make them nasty.