How To Use Guitar Tapping Technique To Play Creative & Unique Licks

Want to play amazingly creative guitar tapping licks that impress others and make your licks sound badass?

You’ve come to the right place!

Tapping is such a cool technique, and the creative options for using it are endless.

Here are three ways to make your guitar tapping more creative to get your own unique sound:
 

Make Your Guitar Scales Sound Incredibly Fast & Smooth

Using tapping with scales gives you the power to play lightning-fast and smooth runs that make people’s jaws drop.

This gives you more creative alternatives to playing standard tapping licks that mostly stay on one or two strings.

Follow this exercise to integrate tapping into your scales:

1. Choose any guitar scale you want. You will use legato to play every note of the scale, except for the last note of each string. This note is the one you will tap.
   
   (I’ll be using 3-note per string scale patterns for this exercise)
    
2. Hammer on the first note of the first string (or pick the note if you need to). Then use legato to hammer on the second note.
    
3. Next, tap the final note of the string using either the index or middle finger of your picking hand.
    
4. Repeat the first three notes in this manner several times until it is clean and smooth.
    
5. Transition to the next note on the next string by releasing pressure from your tapping finger so that it barely touches the string. This mutes the note to keep it from bleeding with the next note.
    
6. Hammer on the first note of the next string and repeat the previous steps until you have played through the entire scale.

If you struggle with string noise still while moving from string to string, consider making some of these additional corrections:

Make Your Tapping Sound More Unique Using Rhythmic Variety

People often tap notes using the same approach:

Tapping as fast as possible in one continuous rhythm.

This sounds cool, but it’s important to know that you are not limited to this approach. Using rhythmic variety makes your tapping technique sound more creative, while making your licks stand out from the crowd.

Try this:

Practice tapping a short lick (that you know or make up) by creating as many rhythmic variations as you can think of in 2 minutes.

You’ll be surprised at just how creative you can get when you do this.

Next, try improvising with this lick over a backing track using the same approach.

This simple practice approach improves your tapping creativity massively!

Achieve Shredder Status By Integrating Tapping With Sweep Picking

Adding a tapped note to the top of your sweep picking arpeggios sounds amazing when you are able to pull it off.

Good news:

It’s not as difficult as you might think. You simply need to avoid the common mistakes other guitarists make while practicing this.