Hand Tap the Guitar!

This time, let’s do something fancy. Let’s talk about hand – tapping. That technique was popularized in the 1970’s by the legendary Eddie Van Halen. He literally blew the minds of guitar players all over the world with this technique; it is featured on the Van Halen song called Eruption. I suggest you listen to their album for more demonstration. Anyway, the solo on Eruption became one of the greatest guitar solo of all time. Right now, we will briefly touch that topic on how to do it. First, let me warn you that you are going to use both of your hands on this. Basically, hand tapping is a combination of hammer ons and pull offs using both of your hands.

You could basically do these two ways, using your right hand. First, you could angle your hand in a parallel manner and pull off in a downward motion or you could angle your hand perpendicular to the neck, like playing piano and do the pull off in an upward motion. However, you could do either way as long as you’re comfortable with it. Now, it is important to know scales for this to work so might as well work your way with scales first.