Truefire Foundry Tapping A To Z

TrueFire Foundry courses are independently produced courses presented by a hand-picked selection of top-notch artists and educators from around the world. Filmed in the educator’s own studio, Foundry courses bring fresh educational concepts and very effective teaching methodologies to TrueFire Students. Scott Allen’s Foundry course, Tapping A to Z will teach you two-handed tapping techniques for the modern rock guitarist.

Hello I'm Scott Allen — welcome to my TrueFire Foundry course, Tapping A to Z, which I produced in my own studio.



This course is for intermediate to advanced players who would like to learn more about essential techniques involved in two handed tapping. We will start you off at the ground floor and teach the quintessential techniques used by tapping innovators such as Eddie Van Halen, George Lynch and Randy Rhoads. Starting with applying tapping to the familiar Pentatonic scale we will get the ball rolling with tapping on one string and then moving to cross string tapping. Next we will add some flavor to our taps with adding slides, double taps and other fun color techniques.

Next we will apply tapping to the Diatonic scale to get more sophisticated sounds like those used by Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Vito Bratta and Reb Beach. We will start by tapping with one scale pattern at a time and then graduate to cross pattern Diatonic tapping. This is the smoothest and most saxophone like sound you can get with a guitar.

Now that we are comfortable with tapping in general we will then take it up a notch by getting into basic eight finger tapping using Pentatonic scales. This is a style forged by the great Jennifer Batten who along with Steve Lynch was one of the earlier innovators of eight finger rock guitar.

Once comfortable with Pentatonics we will get into Chris Broderick territory with Diatonic eight finger tapping using a variety of sequences. This will culminate in harmony tapping where you will be able to harmonize with yourself by playing harmonized lines with both hands. Anyone who has ever heard Michael Angelo Batio has heard this concept but he needs two guitar necks to do it whereas we need only one!

Lastly, no discussion of two handed guitar would be complete without discussing harmonics. Starting with Eddie Van Halen style tapped harmonics we will apply them to arpeggiated chords, whole chords, and finally single note lines. We will also get into jazzy "harp" harmonics like those used by Steve Morse, Eric Johnson and Steve Lukather. These will give you the ability to make your guitar sound like a harp! And as a bonus you don't need a cranked up Marshall to do them properly.

This course will take you from the first baby steps of tapping to some of the most sophisticated two handed techniques used in modern rock guitar.

Ready to get started? Grab your guitar and let’s get dig in!

NOTE! Scott Allen organized the course into 8 weekly sections for those students that prefer to have a specified regimen of material across a specified time schedule. However, for those students who prefer to work at their own pace, or even skip around you are certainly encouraged to approach the course in that way as well.