Romain "Roo" Chapus: legato tapping licks

News:
14-02-2009:
Romain "Roo" Chapus says:

This lesson demonstrates the kind of licks I play when Im in a shred
mood. tab

Most of them include tapping notes. Many guitarists add tapping notes in their legatos licks.
This actually helps to extend arpeggios.
[hints]
Overall, in order to reach a smooth legato technique I focuse on 2 essential issues.
-Playing each note at equal volume.
-Playing each note in correct timing.
I also practiced a lot legato on acoustic guitar in order to increase my fingers strength.

Lick#1
It is quite a famous one. The A 7th arpeggio. There are so many ways to play it.
Im inspired here a lot by Bruce Bouillet who have insane A7 shred licks.
This lick demands a bit of stretching. I pick the minimal amount of notes. I try to hammer on and pull off as many notes as

possible.
It's difficult but important that the tapping notes sound at equal volume so that you get that smooth tone. Of course, feel

free to add a slide on the tapping note on the E high string. I appologize not showing the slide/tapp note in slow motion.
Focus first on mastering the 3 notes/string string skipping arpeggio and while practicing with metronome find a pattern
that is natural for your fingers...

Lick #2
It's an ascending lick. So here we focus on hammer-ons.
It's coming from an A 7M arpeggio. I add the 13th (f#). It's very symetrical and repeat on two strings a groups of
five notes.
It's quite easy to memorize and pretty challenging to run smoothly. Try to turn over the notes on two strings at the
beginning to get familiar with this pattern.

Lick #3
It's a E minor descending pentatonic scale.
There are endless possiblilities with the pentatonic scale.
This one is pretty easy to learn and run over and over. The tapping note is on the beat so it's
easy to keep in timing. The end of the lick is still the E minor pentatonic descending scale using an
unusual finger pattern. Playing 3 notes/string and the slide notes help to get some fluidity in opposition of two
notes/strings scale which is in my opinion very difficult to play fast and neat...

Lick #4
(E+5)
Augmented arpeggios. Sounds weird isn't it?
I love them.
We have here 2 differents augmented arpeggios played on two different positions. Ascending and descending.
The first one (two notes/string) could be played without pick ideally by mutting the strings with the right hand
on the neck. It is symetrical and repeats the same pattern on 2 strings groups...
Here I pick downstroke one time / string. So it's sweeping basically.
The second bar and arpeggio is descending and also played in sweeping but the pick follows the hammerings more

than it leads the arpeggio itself.

Lick #5
Over A7 chord. There's no tapping in this one.
It's a quite common bluesy lick. I used some of these on my solo album.
It based on the A blues scale adding passing notes.
It doesn't necessary need to be played fast. Memorize the notes and run the whole lick slowly untill
you find sense.
The less notes you pick the best it is in order to get this fluid tone.
The pick must be as quiet as possible and helps to enhance notes that would be to weak with hammering notes
"from nowhere"...
Overall, the difficulty with legato is to get equal tone between picked notes, tapping and hammer ons/pull offs...
Practicing with metronome will help you to work in this direction.

See you for next lesson!

MAY school #4 Five legato tapping licks (tab) by Roo