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.

In this exercise, we take the C Major triad from the first exercise, and add another tapping riff on the second string. This will help you get accustomed to changing strings as opposed to just repeating a pattern on a single string.

Here we see the additional notes that we will be playing.

For this exercise, play the the tapped triad arpeggio on the E string just as you did in the first exercise, and then shift positions to play the B string notes. There are a few fingerings you can use. On the E string, I use my first and third, and on the B string I also use 1st and third. I find that works best for me, but that may not be the case for you.