Last September I reviewed a book by Ysrafel which was Book 1 in his “Electric Guitar Technique Master Series” called “Sweep Picking Mastery” which is an excellent book covering everything you will ever need to become a sweep picking god! Well Ysrafel has done it again this time Book 2 is called “The Essential Tapping Resource” a very apt title considering the amount of ground covered.
I learned how to tap by watching Van Halen - Live Without a Net
and copying what I saw Eddie doing. From there I studied a few of Eddies tracks to get to grips a bit better with the technique but to be honest I never really took it much further and generally don’t tap when I am improvising because I don’t have a dictionary of licks I can turn to. This book covers absolutely everything from where and how to hold your pick whilst tapping with your index finger and also covers tapping using your middle finger and eventually all four fingers. The exercises begin with 2 note tapping patterns which help you to get to grips moving around the fretboard with both hands while making sure the other strings are muted correctly. Once you have progressed through the initial exercises Ysrafel moves on to tapping triads and the first chapter ends with an triad progression which combines tapping with an open string and hammer ons. All examples are tabbed very clearly and the book is divided up into sections of increasing difficulty in order to help you progress. Chapter 3 moves on to 4 and 5 note tapping patterns and tapping scales and ends on something I found particularly tricky which is an exercise that crosses strings and uses hammer ons on strings while you muted the tapped string with your tapping finger, it is hard to explain but it is a very cool idea something I intend to try and master. Chapter 4 takes it another step further by introducing string skipped tapping patterns, these sound particularly cool. I’m a big fan of string skipping ever since I first saw Paul Gilbert’s Intense Rock II video
. This section takes you beyond Van Halen intro Guthrie Govan territory and if you haven’t done much two handed tapping you will need to work through these examples slowly at first. There are some string skipped triad arpeggio examples which will always come in useful in the future. The last exercise combines everything you have learned so far but also includes left hand slides just to make you sweat even more, and that string skipping between the 2 E strings is just plain evil… I’ll get there, eventually! Chapter 5 takes you into the insane world of Jennifer Batten or Chris Broderick with multi finger tapping. These examples are provided by Niels Vejlyt and to be honest I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to do this, it feels very alien almost like starting to play guitar all over again but I would love to able to comfortably throw in some multi finger tapping licks so I will persevere. Chapter 6 concludes the book by showing other techniques to expand your tapping licks such as bending and tapping and sweep arpeggios with taps.
“The Essential Tapping Resource” is available from Ysrafel.com for $29.00.
