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 is the most basic imaginable tapping exercise, but it is a great exercise to get started on developing your tapping technique. The exercise actually amounts to playing a C Major triad using tapping.

Here we see a C Major triad spread out on the E string.

With this exercise, use your right hand to tap onto the 15th fret. Use whatever finger you feel comfortable with. Don't need a pick for this one!

In this exercise, we are simply adding a note to the previous exercise. The added note will force you to develop coordiation with your tapping finger, as you will be continually shiftinf from the 15th to 20th fret with the tapping finger.

Here we see the C Major triad arpeggio from the previous exercise, with the C added at the 20th fret.

With this exercise, use your right hand to tap onto the 15th and 20th fret. Use whatever finger you feel comfortable with. You could even use two fingers to tap if you wanted to be really adventurous. But for now just concentrate developing the coordination needed to shift positions with the tapping finger.

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.

In this exercise, you will practice tapped slides (and hopefully not get a blister in the meantime!). If you are like me, and don't use tapping that often, then your tapping fingers could very well form a painful blister from the motion of sliding back and forth between the 15th and 17 frets. But when it comes to tapping, you definately want to be able to throw some slides in there. It is a really cool effect!

The fretboard diagram for this exercise is similar to the first exercise, wit the addition of the A note at the 17 fret. By adding this note, we are actually turning this exercise into a C Major 7th arpeggio. How about that!

For this exercise, tap onto the 15th fret with whatever finger you are comfortable with, then slide with that finger up to the 17th fret, and then slide back down to the 15th fret. Be careful though - if you do this exercise enough times, you may develop a blister!

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.

if you have never heard of Nuno Bettencourt, then you need to do yourself a favor and buy the first two CDs from the band Extreme. Extreme had a hit song called Get the Funk Out that has a pretty infamous tapping section. Nuno made a name for himself by playing tapped arpeggios in his trademark way.

The fretboard diagram above show the notes played for the first part of the section. This pattern then repeats itself, making it an easier riff than you might think by hearing it. I have indicated the suggested fingerings for this one.

Before playing this entire riff, get comfortable playing the first part at the position shown in the fretboard diagram. Once you nail down that pattern, then play the entire riff. All you do is continue sliding that pattern up the neck as shown in the Tab. If you want to hear the MIDI file up to speed (Nuno played it at 108 BPM), then make sure you set the MIDI playback tempo to 108.