 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential, my name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with MusicTeacher.com and in this video we're going to take a look at some basics of two-hand tapping. All of the tones you're hearing in this video are coming directly from the Blackstar Studio 10 6L6 which is on the drive channel. The drive is set pretty high, just over three-quarters of the way up and the amp is mic'd with a Luit Audio LCD 440 condenser microphone. Two-hand tapping is a great rock and metal guitar technique. It's a great way to extend your legato runs so you can essentially do hammer-ons and pull-offs with two hands at the same time over much wider intervals of the fretboard. It actually looks a lot harder to do than it is. Once you get a few basic principles down it's pretty easy to get on board with this technique but it looks really impressive to anyone who sees it for the first time. So in this lesson we're going to look at two-handed tapping in a couple of different ways. The first of which is doing a hammer-on with the fretting hand. So what we're going to be doing here is this hammer-on on the B string, the fifth fret up to the eighth. Then you're going to take either your index finger or your middle finger from your picking hand. This depends on comfort so try this out both ways. If you're holding your pick between your thumb and your index finger you may find it easier to use your middle finger to tap or if you're like me you may find it easier to flip the pick into the palm of the hand and tap with the index finger. Once I've picked which finger I'm going to tap with so for me it's going to be my index finger. I'm going to be tapping the 12th fret of the B string so treat this like you're fretting a note or hammering on a note. You want to actually tap the string until it physically connects with the fret and sounds that note. So the phrase we're going to be doing starts with a tap so I'm going to be tapping that 12th fret. My index finger is going to be on the fifth fret ready so when I pull this finger off we're going to hear the note on the fifth fret and then with this hand I'm going to hammer on to the eight. So this gives me a three note phrase. 12, 5, 8 all in one motion. The timing of this is based around triplets so that's three notes across every beat but the great thing we're tapping is you can double up speeds pretty easily so you could get that up to six notes per beat with a bit of practice. It's all about getting into that rhythm. That's a great tapping to start with because you're doing the high note to pull off to the low and then hammering on to the other note. Once you hit that eighth fret you then hammer back on to the 12th with the tap so as you can see there's a bit of a rhythm to this so once you find that triplet rhythm it's really easy to lock into. If you're doing this with a metronome it's going to be one and a. So that's going to be one which is the tap onto the 12th and which is the fifth fret and then a which is the eighth fret and that repeats. The second way we're going to look at this is like a pull off so instead of doing a hammer on with my fratting hand from the five to the eight I'm now going to be pulling off from the eight to the five so that means my initial tap is actually going to go from the 12 to the eight and then I'm going to be doing a pull off from the eight down to the five. The same rhythm applies so we can do this as triplets. Once you get that rhythm locked in you can then build up the speed quite easily. You could even combine them if you're feeling adventurous you could do a hammer on and then a pull off in two alternating groups. That's another great way you can use tapping. So as you can see it's a great way to extend scales along one string. You can get some pretty fast bursts of speed and the wide interval gap between the first note and the last note makes this technique sound really impressive and really exciting. So you can apply this on any string you're basically targeting notes from the scale so you can either use pentatonic scales or you can use other scales that you may know. So in that instance I was taking the five and the eight from the A minor pentatonic scale and the 12th fret from the A natural minor scale because that is a B note. You can do this in any key in any position so I could apply that same lick on the high E string or the low E string. Works anywhere you want it to on the guitar and the final little tapping trick I'm going to show you and this is a really fun one. If you just want to throw a single tap note into a guitar solo it's to play a string bend and tap a note at the pinnacle of the bend. So I'm going to bend the seventh fret on the G and I'm going to tap the 12 and 14. So these notes I'm going to tap are actually higher up in the scale they're from the fourth minor pentatonic shape in A but because I'm actually bending this seventh fret on the G up a full tone these two notes are actually going to take on a higher pitch so even though I'm tapping 12 and 14 what you're actually going to hear is 14 and 16 because I'm already doing that full tone pitch shift with the bend so the function is higher notes they actually then come from the fifth shape of the minor pentatonic and the natural minor scale. Don't worry too much if you don't know all your scale ships fully you can still use this lick as it is but that is the theory of where those notes come from. So let's put that into a lick so the lick I'm going to do is this that kind of typical rock lick A minor pentatonic. I'm going to do that bend then I'm going to do a tap onto the 12 the 14 and back to the 12 so you're going to hear this alternation between the low note and the high note each time after the final tap pulls off I'm going to release the bend and work my way back down to my seventh fret on the D string. So that's a great fun lick you can throw into rock solos and with those high tap notes it looks pretty impressive but as you'll find out as you do this it's not as hard as it looks. So there you go guys there is a basic overview of two hand tapping and how you can get started with this. There are a bunch more advanced tapping concepts that we're going to cover in future videos but for now that should be enough to get you guys kick started with the technique. Let me know down below in the comments how you've gotten on with this technique and I'd love to hear how you guys have used this in your own playing. Thank you guys so much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this lesson like I said let me know down below in the comments what you thought and if there are any other topics you'd like to see us talk about in these videos please throw those below as well. Don't forget to check out Blackstar amplification on YouTube for more free videos just like this. If you're looking for a guitar teacher in your local area please head to MusicTeacher.com and check out the database of great guitar teachers all around the UK waiting to help you guys out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon.