Free Tutorial: Learn How To Play Guitar With Amazing Tapping Technique
Wish you could play impressive guitar tapping licks whenever you wanted?
Good news: This is much easier to do than you think!
Learning the correct fundamentals for tapping technique helps you play cool licks that are fast, clean and musically expressive.
Sound good?
Great!
Get started playing amazing guitar tapping licks using the advice in this video:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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Combine the cool tapping ideas you learned in the video with these tips to take your lead guitar to a new level:
Overcome Two Guitar Improvisation Myths To Become More Creative
To become a creative guitar player, you must stay away from the common myths other guitarists spread about musical creativity. Failing to do this makes playing creatively a struggle for you.
The following are the two most common myths that prevent you from playing with a high degree of creativity on guitar:
Myth #1. Musical Creativity Is A Skill
This is not true.
Musical creativity is the result of your mastery with skills that make creativity possible AND your ability to integrate those skills together. When you don’t understand this, you are more likely to not work on skill integration.
For instance, you may learn a lot about music theory and work on your guitar technique, but never learn how to creatively integrate these things together in a solo.
This makes you feel lost because you have great skills, but aren’t able to use them to make your music sound interesting.
Working on integration during your practice sessions helps you become more creative. Some of the skills you need to learn how to integrate while improvising include: aural skills, music theory, fretboard visualization, lead guitar technique and phrasing.
Myth #2. You’re Born With Musical Creativity Or You’re Not
It’s common for many guitarists to explain their lack of musical creativity as not having “natural talent”. Wrong! Musical creativity does not come from being born with natural talent - it is something you develop and improve.
Believing that it only comes from natural talent holds you back because if you believe you don’t have it, you give up on it.
This single belief prevents countless guitarists from learning how to play creative guitar solos, write music, improvise and many other things. Some people quit guitar altogether. Working together with an experienced guitar teacher is the best way to understand how to develop musical creativity.
Now that you understand more about the myths that prevent you from playing creatively on guitar, you are ready to take action and become a more creative guitarist.
The Difference Between Guitar Players Who Improvise Well And Those Who Can’t
You don’t need to be born with natural talent to be a creative guitar player. Those who are creative are different from everyone else in one particular way:
Guitar players with the best, most creative improvising ability don’t think faster than other guitarists... but they are able to use phrases they are already familiar with together with phrasing and phrasing adaptation skills. This helps them change any guitar lick to fit into a specific context.
This is how great guitarists make amazing phrasing ideas that fit into their lead guitar playing without having to continually think of new licks during every moment of a solo.
The following are a few things great guitar players do to play amazing phrases in their improvisations:
Focusing On The Rhythm Of The Notes
You do not have to continually play different pitches while playing a guitar solo. Excellent guitar players understand this and do not get stuck thinking about what notes they should be playing.
They trained themselves on how to play notes in order to create great phrases. By simply focusing on the rhythm of the notes you are playing, you can repeat the same notes again and again in different, creative ways. This keeps your guitar solos interesting even though you are using the same notes.
Utilizing Musical Ornamentation
Any guitar phrase can be made to sound more interesting when you use various guitar techniques to ornament it. Guitarists with excellent improvising skills are able to spice up the most bland lick by adding a trill, slide, bend or double stop to the end of a phrase.
Using Sequencing To Make Scales Sound Like Music
Most guitar players use scales in their solos in a way that sounds more like an exercise/drill than musical phrasing. To make scales sound interesting in a solo, great guitarists use sequencing to make them very memorable. This is how great players make solos that have a melody you want to sing.
These are just a few ways great guitar players improvise amazing solos. Your improvisation skills go to a new level when you understand how to apply these concepts into your guitar playing.
Bonus: There are many guitar practice mistakes that keep you from making much progress.
Here are 3 of the biggest ones to avoid:
Mistake #1: Practicing Guitar Without Goals
Not having clearly-defined guitar playing goals makes it nearly impossible to make a lot of progress. This makes every practice session random and unstructured.
This means that you might make progress in one area a little bit, then progress in another area a little bit and then become totally stuck at other times.
When you set clear goals for yourself, you are able to create practice schedule with items that help you achieve those goals effectively. This keeps you from becoming overwhelmed because you are practicing many things at once without knowing if they are helping you make progress.
Mistake #2: Practicing Guitar Inconsistently
It’s very difficult to make progress when you only practice guitar once every couple of weeks, or twice every three weeks.
Consistent practice is needed to solidify good playing habits and help you get into a routine of improving. Since practicing consistently gets more results, it also makes you motivated to continue practicing.
This creates a snowball effect of progress that helps you become a killer player very quickly.
Mistake #3: Not Tracking Progress
Tracking and measuring your progress every week is the only way to know exactly how effective your guitar practice efforts are. Without doing this, you might continue using poor guitar practice methods for a long time before realizing that they don't really help you improve!
Track and measure the results you get every week to ensure that your playing is on the right track and refine your practice approach as needed.
For example: track how many mistakes you make with a given exercise, or how long you can play it before making a single mistake or the speed at which you can play it. The more specific you can be, the more precisely you can refine your practice to get better results.
Now that you know which mistakes to avoid, learn more ways to get better at guitar faster.
Taking guitar lessons with a teacher is a great way to improve your rhythm guitar playing fast. Just ask some of my students:
“When I met Tom Hess, I knew that this is the guy. Just going through the evaluation form, all the questions, different questions, and he was digging deeper and deeper into all my goals and all that stuff... and no one has ever done that with me before, so I felt right away that this is the guy.”
The level that I was at before I went to Tom for lessons was that I could play pretty fast, I could play sloppy, I didn’t know nothing about music theory, so I was kind of unbalanced, I was uneven. I was a good player technically, but I knew very little about music theory. So I wanted to even that out, and Tom has helped me, not only evening that out, but also exceeding my expectations. So now I’m playing at a level that I didn’t expect that I could play at. So that’s... I’m very happy with that.
I like lessons with Tom because of the format basically. He gives a variety of formats... not just one format, like video for example, but also pdf files and audio files that you can take with you if you’re doing something else... you have to do labor that day, laundry or whatever... then you can listen to the sessions and while... you can actually benefit when you’re not even practicing, so it’s a no brainer.Gottfrid Norberg Waxin, Sweden
“I found Tom Hess on the net through articles, and I read quite a few of those before I went to Tom’s website. Even though I’m not a metal player at all, and Tom is obviously a metal player, I could still see that his ideas and way of teaching could really benefit me. So I pretty much signed up for online guitar lessons with Tom straight away once I’d gone through the website, and it’s just been a real eye opener with the way he teaches…”
... the integration of concepts that he’ll give you and having a really structured strategy… not just week to week lessons, but things that - you can see from one lesson to the next - really develop and continue to work on your technique and your theory and aural skills and those types of things. So I’d played a long time… 20 years before I really caught onto Tom, and I’d had a lot of lessons, and I’d taught and played but I can really see improvements in my technique, sweeping, and picking which weren’t strong parts of my playing.
I feel like Tom has a good gauge of where you’re at as a guitar player and what you need, and there just seemed to be so much more stuff in the lessons week to week than what you’d ever get in an hour or so in a one on one lesson… way more. So yeah I think that and the forum. I think, I’d pay the money just for the forum. That alone would be fine… I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. So that alone is massive!
The price for the lessons, that’s nothing... nothing. You know, I think it’s, pretty cheap to be honest. I don’t mean that in a bad way, cheap. Cheap is not a good word, but I just think it’s great value… awesome value. I mean, you know, you could pay that for one-to-one lessons and you just don’t get the same results and support of the forum and the content and the strategies.
Other teachers I’ve had have been good players, and some have become good friends too. But when I’ve started lessons with Tom I’ve got something to compare that to and a lot of it is just sort of teaching songs from week to week… a lot of the lesson will be left up to you… you’ll go to your lesson and they’ll be like what do you want to do today? At the time I said, oh do this song or that song, but with Tom you start to realize that you know, there’s more to it… the goals and you know he’s sort of more in contact with what you want to be able to do as a player, because he’s asking you the questions and then setting up the strategies, so I find that really good.
Yeah I can see more results in 18 months in a lot of areas in my playing than you know 20 years. So it’s sort of, you know, would’ve been great 20 years ago to have met Tom.
Simon Candy, Melbourne, Australia
“I've played guitar for several years and I think I've taken it as far as I could take it and I was going on the internet and found Tom, I take Breakthrough Guitar Lessons from him and I have to say it was the best thing that I've ever could have done. There is nothing better than Breakthrough Guitar Lessons with Tom.”
Tom has the innate ability to hone in on whatever problems you have and immediately fix it for you. The lessons are very goal oriented, very detailed and Tom is very approachable. I consider Tom to be a master teacher. A master teacher is someone who cares about their students, who talks to their students, who shares with their students and gets them to the place that they need to be as a guitar player. And Tom, I will tell you, does all of that and more.
Rovan Deon, Rahway, NJ, USA
After watching the video, you now know how to play killer tapping licks just like a pro. Now it's time to master every aspect of lead guitar playing. How? By taking online metal guitar lessons.