tapping is a guitar technique where your strumming hand joins your other hand on the fretboard, using hammer-ons and pull-offs to continue phrases without any normal strumming or picking. it lets you do some pretty complex riffs, since you don't have to slide and contort your fretting hand to move across the neck, and sounds pretty dang cool.
i finally started learning to do this a few weeks ago, and struggled *tons* at first to get the notes to be clean and audible. i saw tips online to use a compressor and distortion to make the tapped notes louder, which led to me sinking tons of time into adjusting settings to really no avail. it also didn't help that i hadn't touched my guitar in years (about 5, so not as bad as the 15 in winter's post from earlier today, thanks winter for reminding me to finish this post), so i didn't have any calluses and needed to take frequent breaks.
Writer's Block Broken (At Least, Temporarily) (by ~winter) (open in gemini client)
i eventually, after a few days and much frustration, came across someone online advising to practice without any effects, and to only add the effects once you've got the technique down. this did wonders after all the time i sank into playing with the whole effect chain, and really left me thinking about how willing i was to use a crutch to make up for my lack of ability there. it is always soooo satisfying picking up a new musical skill, and tapping had always intimidated me until now because i thought i just wasn't good at it and gave up without really trying.
obligatory sidenote that you've probably read a dozen times by now across the internet: i'm a software engineer, and i've been finding more and more recently that i reach for coding agents to do work that i can do, even in situations where they do the work slower and still require review due to frequent mistakes. i think i need to acknowledge that the tool is really an obstacle at this point and go back to the old ways. agents can be just as much of a crutch as audio effects i guess.
anyway, go listen to incandescent by mountains, that's the song that got me back into guitar and into tapping. i'm happy to say i can now play the intro riff!
mirrored from gemini