Harmonic Slapping
The Art of Slapping
This is a cool little technique to add some extra color, and give your acoustic tapping songs some style. To perform a harmonic slap you need to tighten your four fingers together on your right hand and loosely slap it down on the fretboard at a given fret and quickly release so the notes will ring out. Another technique for harmonic taps is to slingshot your first finger across all the strings, this usually is only performed on the frets higher than twelve. Okay so slapping on a given fret isn't as easy as it sounds, you have to be very accurate and hit all the strings evenly. Right now just try slapping all the strings on the 12th fret with your right hand and just keep all the notes open. Practice this several times wait until you can hear all the notes ringing out on every string.
Slap harmonics are signified in tabs as a (SH) under the corresponding frets slapped. If there are no fretted notes it will have frets in marked like this (12), (7), (5), this just means your slapping those frets with the given string open. If you are slapping a note that is fretted you it will be marked normally such as 5, 2, 9, and might have a signified place to slap next to it like so: 5(12), 8(17).
Take a look at the examples:
So in the second example you see I did not write which harmonics to slap on the 5, 7, and 5 frets, because it should be self explanatory hence the notes slapped around the notes fretted. The third example you are only going to want to slap three notes on the 4th, 5th and 3rd strings, and where to slap is denoted by the (12) located next to the note.
Slapping and Tapping
Tapping notes then slapping notes in succession is a particularly hard skill to master because accuracy and speed are key. We will do an exercise very slowly to get the hang of switching from tapping to slapping harmonic notes.
Remember to count with the numbers under the fretted notes so you know how long each duration is and try to be consistent on slapping those harmonics.
Great now the lesson is done, pretty short lesson but we will touch upon slap harmonics later in advanced tutorials.
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