THE OVER-THE-NECK TAPPING EXTRAVAGANZA

For this issue’s lesson I’m once again feeling a little inspired by Steve Vai. If you’ve seen Vai live any time in the last , oh, 15 years, you would have caught him playing a song called “Building The Church” which includes a few very cool over-the-top-of-the-neck two-handed tapping sections.

This isn’t a particularly new idea – Joe Satriani is all over this stuff, and while Van Halen did something similar on ‘Judgement Day’ on 1991’s For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, he’d been messing around with the technique for a long time before that – but it’s still a somewhat under-utilised technique which can give you a lot of cool melodic and harmonic options.

What I’ve done for this lesson is created a chord vamp which we will outline using two-handed tapping. The chords are Am7, G add 11/A, Am/G and Em7. Play them all one after the other, one per bar, and you’ve got a pretty cool backing to solo over (in fact, I’m using it to write a song already, but don’t steal it).

These chords have a lot of close intervals, which makes them sound particularly pianistic, especially if you play with a clean tone. A distorted tone will make the chords sound like arse, but when played with tapping and some nicely compressed distortion, it becomes a cool show-stopping trick. It’s also a great way to build up strength in your picking-hand fingers which you can then use for more orthodox techniques, like fingerpicking.

What we’re going to do is place both hands over the top of the fretboard, tap the notes on the A, G and B strings with our picking hand, and the notes on the D and high E strings with our fretting hand. The same general melodic contour is maintained throughout, although the Em7 section throws in a little A note just after the third beat of the bar to keep things interesting.

As always, it’s incredibly important to start slowly and in perfect time so you can play it cleanly when you get it up to speed. Fret the left-hand (if you’re a righty) notes with your index finger (the D string) and your middle finger (the high E) while using the rest of your hand to mute the strings just firmly enough that they don’t make a sound, but not so hard that they ring out with muffled notes here and there. For the right hand part, use your index finger on the A string, your middle on the G string, and your ring finger on the B.

If you’d like to record the chord pattern as an exercise to jam over, try splitting the notes of each chord between two guitars. Perhaps the bottom two notes of each chord would work great with some crunchy overdrive while the top three notes can ring out with a clean sound. Play the lower chords as palm-muted eighth-notes while letting the higher chords ring out as whole notes with some chorus and delay for a bit of a Joe Satriani – “Not Of This Earth” kind of feel.