In my opinion tapping is one of the most overused and misused guitar techniques out there. Poorly executed tapping sounds juvenile, whereas majestically executed tapping sounds beautiful. If you want to hear some absolutely superb tapping technique check out Nuno Bettencourt on the songs "He-Man Woman Hater" and "Get the Funk Out". Nuno tends to play arpeggios via tapping and that is one of the most fluid, smooth ways to play arpeggios. If Nuno's technique doesn't get you fired up, then check out Jeff Watson's solo on the Night Ranger song "You can Still Rock in America". There Jeff shows off his 8 finger tapping technique for which he is well known.

In this lesson I will go over some basic tapping exercises and then end with some more advanced exercises that demonstrate tapped arpeggios.

This exercise involves using tapping to make a rapid hammer-on, pull-off trill. A trill is when you repeatedly hammer-on and pull-off between 2 notes. It is usually a legato technique, but here, we combine leagto with tapping to create the trill effect.

The fretboard layout of notes for this exercise is exactly as in the first exercise. We are sticking with the C major triad.

This exercise is played like the first exercise, but this time tap the 15th fret twice in a row to create what is called a trill.