Guitar Tapping: Your First Two-Hand Licks

Tapping is the rare guitar technique that looks harder than it is. The cascading triplets, the finger hammering down from above, the unmistakable whiff of the 1980s: all of it comes from one idea you already own. A tapped note is a hammer-on played by your picking hand. You built the fretting-hand half of this in the legato lesson, and the seed was planted back in hammer-ons and pull-offs. This lesson adds one finger from the other hand and turns the result into three licks.

Set up both hands

First decide which finger taps. The middle finger is the practical choice because the pick stays put between thumb and index, ready for whatever comes after the lick. Tapping with the index while the pick hides in your palm is the classic Van Halen setup and works just as well. Pick one now and stop thinking about it; the choice matters far less than the consistency.

Second, muting, which is half the technique. Two mutes run at once: the fretting-hand index lies flat and light across the strings you are not playing, and the picking-hand palm rests on the wound strings. Skip either one and every tap sets off sympathetic ringing that buries the lick. Practice clean, too. Gain hides weak notes, and you want to hear exactly which ones are weak.

The tap itself is a small snap down onto the fret from an inch or two away, and the exit matters as much as the landing. Leave the string with a tiny sideways flick toward the floor so the departure plucks the string. That pluck is what powers the note after the tap. A finger that lifts straight up produces a pull-off you can barely hear.

The classic lick: one chord, two hands

The first lick is the one everybody learns, and it earns its fame. On the high E string: tap fret 12, flick off to your index at fret 5, hammer your pinky onto fret 8. Three notes, E, A, C, which is A minor spelled one note at a time with the chord split across both hands. Loop it in triplets, three notes per click.

Bar 2 moves the tap down to fret 10, a D, while the fretted pair stays home. D against A minor is the fourth, so the loop stops sounding settled and starts sounding like a question. The bar answers it by landing on a quarter-note A at fret 5 with vibrato. Notice how much mileage one moved finger buys: same hands, same rhythm, new harmony.

Move the tap, spell the progression

That trick, moving only the tap, scales up into whole progressions. In the next figure the fretted pair never moves: index on 5 (A), pinky on 8 (C), two notes that several chords happen to share. Fret 12 (E) on top completes A minor. Slide the tap up one fret to 13 (F) and the same two fretted notes now spell F major, F, A, C, root on top.

Bar 2 asks more of you: the entire shape relocates for G major, tap on 15 (G), index on 7 (B), ring finger on 10 (D). That two-fret jump from 13 to 15 is where taps start missing, so watch the target fret, not your fretting hand. The bar closes with one A minor loop and settles on A with vibrato. In two bars you have outlined Am, F, G and home again, a full progression on a single string.

The same engine on the B string

Nothing about tapping is married to the high E string. Move the whole machine to the B string and the note pool changes character. Tap 10 (A), pull off to 5 (E), hammer 8 (G): root, fifth, minor seventh, an Am7 sound rather than a plain triad. Then the tap climbs to 13 (C), and C, E, G is a C major triad, the relative major of A minor. Over an A minor groove that C major color brightens everything without leaving the key.

Bar 2 taps fret 12, a B, the ninth of A minor. B, E, G against an Am chord is the note choice that makes listeners assume you know what you are doing. The lick then walks the tap back to 10 and ends on a held A with vibrato, which is your cue that the harmonic tour is over. One warning for inner-string tapping: the open high E sits a millimeter from everything you are doing. The fretting index has to lean up and touch it the whole time.

How to practice this

Fifteen minutes, three blocks. Five minutes on the first lick with a metronome at 60 BPM, triplets, and only move toward the written 80 when every note in the loop speaks at the same volume; the tap tends to be loud and the pull-off shy. Five minutes on the triad lick, most of it spent on the 13-to-15 jump in bar 2. Five minutes on the B-string lick with a muting check: stop dead mid-loop and listen. If anything keeps ringing, that string was never muted. Finish by taking one tapped loop to an A minor backing track and moving the tap wherever your ear suggests. Next lesson the pick takes its revenge: sweep picking.