Intertwining Hammer-Ons and Pull-Offs with Both Hands

Hello everyone, and welcome to my new series of Guitar World columns. 

I’d like to begin this new round with a look at the two-hand tapping techniques I use on a track called “Melancholia” (check it out below), which I recorded as a guest spot with the band John Brown’s Flux Conduct for their 2016 album, Yetzer Hara: The Second Concept Album. Many of you may know John from his work with the U.K. tech-metal band Monuments.

To me, fretboard tapping on an acoustic guitar is very different from tapping on an electric because when tapping on an acoustic I often think vertically—moving across the strings within a fixed group of frets—rather than horizontally, moving up and down the length of the fretboard. 

For this song, my guitar is in DADGAD tuning (low to high, D A D G A D) with a capo at the fourth fret. One of the nice advantages this tuning offers you is the ability to easily sound octaves, fifths and desirable combinations of harmonics by fretting different strings at the same fret, such as with a barre fingering. Regarding my use of the capo here, I refer to all notes and chords as if the capo were the nut, or zero fret. So, for example, I’ll refer to the open sixth string as “D,” although it actually sounds a concert-pitch Fs due to the capo transposition.

An essential aspect of two-hand tapping is for the volume and attack of the notes to remain even and consistent between the two hands. In the actual musical piece, this first bar is in 5/4, but I would like to walk you through each beat before addressing the entire 5/4 bar. 

FIGURE 1 illustrates the initial tapped pattern,