“Boogie Shred,” from my 2013 album What Just Happened, is the very first song I ever wrote on acoustic guitar. In my column that appeared...
“Boogie Shred,” from my 2013 album What Just Happened, is the very first song I ever wrote on acoustic guitar. In my column that appeared in the Holiday 2016 issue of Guitar World, I had broken down the tune’s intro and verse sections, and I’d now like to return to the piece to demonstrate its cool middle section, which I perform entirely with fret- and pick-hand tapping.
I think of these tapped figures as being “vertical,” as opposed to “horizontal,” a horizontal tapped figure being one that moves up and down a given string, à la Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” solo, and vertical tapping being where multiple notes are tapped across different strings in a given position in order to sound harmonies and octaves with a single hand.
Although this passage of music might seem intimidating, it is actually one of the easiest licks of mine to perform. It’s all about the delegation of responsibility between the hands. The figures are based on alternating between the two hands, so there are no inordinately fast movements required of either. To me, it’s like playing a roll on a snare drum, where both hands work in tandem to create the sound as opposed to frantically trying to play a blast beat with one hand!
“Boogie Shred” is performed in DADGAD tuning (low to high, D A D G A D). The middle-section figure that I’m going to show you is based on four groups of three, in that three evenly spaced notes are sounded on each beat. As shown in FIGURE 1, on beat one, I begin with a slap of the open sixth string, followed by hammer ons to the third and fifth frets on the fifth string. FIGURE 2