1 Essential Guitar Triad Exercise

 Whilst the latter half of the last century of music nurtured the electric guitar, fuelled by advances in digital electronic technologies (which in turn fuelled electronic, hip-hop and the likes), a rather smaller proportion of guitar players have stuck to their roots and taken acoustic guitar playing to the next level. Continuously evolving over time, these “new acoustic guitarists” emerged making use of the additional sounds possible on an acoustic and consequently developed ever more complex arrangements. The body of an acoustic guitar presents a naturally unique yet surprising globally unexplored potential which many of these players have capitalised on – i.e. it’s still a sound box!

I first came across this style of playing in the late 1990s when my friend, then singer of the same band we were in, bought me a Tuck and Patti album for Christmas. As a classically trained guitarist herself, she knew that the world of Tuck Andreas, Michael Hedges, Acoustic Alchemy (UK readers may remember the theme tune to the BBC show Gardener’s World with Alan Titchmarsh) would open up to me and I was eventually introduced me to today’s geniuses of the genre, such as Preston Reed, Jaquie Gipson and Vicki Genfan. The principle also made it into the popular music genre with Newton Faulkner taking the lead. Now before you feel you have to rush out to buy your very own “guitar-harp” or anything fancy, it’s possible to use your own acoustic to get very similar results.

What is percussive guitar playing?

“Percussive guitar” or “3D guitar” is a method of playing an acoustic guitar by complimentary incorporation of percussive sounds together with traditional guitar techniques. It provides guitarists with a larger palette of tones and voices to write and play with. The advantage is that you no longer have to consider an acoustic guitar just as a melody or chord generating instrument, but also as a rhythmic generating one too.

Why use this style?

Having come from a rock guitar background myself, the way these players used the instrument attracted me due to the sheer power and grooves you can add to your playing. This is a particularly useful technique to have within your “guitar-dom-ness” for playing solo or being an accompanist to a singer. Certainly for a time in the UK, many pubs and clubs held regular “open-mic nights” which allows up to two people to perform without the venue having to arrange and pay for special public performance licenses. Thus it was a great way to find lots of places to air your music to an audience and quickly stand out. Also check out my for another technique I use for similar reasons.

How to play percussive tap guitar (Part 1)?

In this mini lesson video, we first locate where on the acoustic guitar body we want to generate our sounds. Here are just a few other notes to add.

• We will use the two hand finger tapping technique as our springboard baseline method. This way, all we have to do is slightly modify a style we may already be used to.
• I’ve chosen to teach the principles using standard guitar tuning. Once the principles are understood, alternative tunings can be used – the guitarists named above use alternate tunings to make fingering of chords more accessible for this style.
• I know some of you who have already studied Preston Reed may be thinking that I’ve chosen different parts of the guitar body to play the equivalent kick drum and snare drum tone. I show the kick drum tone from the upper part of the guitar body to give access to playing bass notes with the kick drum tone. The reason for this being that typical arrangements with a full rhythm section, the kick drum falls tightly with the bass note. The other option is to develop your fret hand technique to pick strings too!
• For the snare equivalent, there is another alternative which is similar to my percussive strumming lesson. You can form a “flat fist” (similar to a kung-fu style Leopard fist shape) and tap over the strings with your finger nails at the same time applying a palm mute. For this tutorial I’ve chosen to use the tapping method which is a slight alteration of finger tapping which allows notes to ring out rather than cutting off everything every time. One extra tip I need to mention, when tapping notes on the acoustic guitar with your picking hand, you will find you have to mute the other side of the string with your fretting hand to stop it from sounding as well.

, we’ll go through the basic principles for putting it all together.

If you enjoyed this mini tutorial and found it useful, please feel free to leave me a message and let others know. Thanks, enjoy, have fun and good luck!