THE PURSUIT OF TAPPINESS
OF ALL THE things that remain most important to guitar players, such as being able to write cool, catchy riffs, solo with great feeling and being able to play perfectly in tune all the time, there’s one desire that allures many rock players especially — speed. Just like the first time you stole your parents’ car, there is for most players a certain thrill and exhilaration to playing fast licks. For these guitarists, one surefire way to achieve steadily continuous note production at high velocity is to use fretboard tapping.
Fretboard tapping is a technique for which both hands are used to independently sound different notes on the instrument. In fretboard tapping, a pick-hand finger sounds a note by tapping the fretboard on a specific string and fret. This technique allows a guitarist not only to play musical phrases rapidly but also to cover much wider areas of the fretboard than could possibly be reached with just the fretting hand. During the late Seventies, Eddie Van Halen blasted out of Southern California with an explosive sound that blew everyone away. His show-stopping solo masterpiece, “Eruption,” recorded for the debut Van Halen album, featured long passages of fretboard tapping. Virtually overnight, Eddie was a star and fretboard tapping became de rigueur for aspiring shredmeisters.
In truth, fretboard tapping techniques can be traced back to earlier centuries: violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini used similar techniques on the violin during the early 1800s, and a tapping-like technique known as selpe was used in traditional Turkish folk music. Examples of the tapping on electric guitar can be found throughout the 20th century, such as late-Sixties guitarist Randy Resnick’s attempt to approximate saxophone great John Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” in his work with John Mayall, jazz/rock pioneer Harvey Mandel’s employment of the technique on many of his records, and avant garde genius Frank Zappa’s tapping with the edge of the pick during his solo in “Inca Roads” (, 1975). Let us also not forget Steve Hackett, Roy Smeck, Dave Bunker (check out “Dave Bunker on Ozark Jubilee Circa 1960” on YouTube) and Vittorio Camardese, whose circa-1965 two-hand tapping caused quite a stir when we shared a video on back in 2013. (Be sure to Google “Amateur Guitarist Vittorio
