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Learn Lead Guitar

This lens is dedicated to the art of lead guitar and will have lessons in the style of rock, blues and country posted here. Mostly for beginners to intermediate. Let me know what you're looking for and I'll add it!

Hammer Ons

If you want to learn lead guitar or learn to read blues guitar tabs you'll need to know how to play hammer ons

Hammer Ons are one of the articulation techniques used by guitarists to create a smooth and flowing sound on the guitar also know as legato. When you look at the bare essentials of a guitar it basically boils down to wire and wood. That's it in a nutshell... So how do we create emotion and feeling out of wire and wood? Well on of the ways is through proper use of articulation which has been designed to emulate the human voice which is everything besides wire and wood! If you can learn to play guitar like you speak or at least make it something you strive for then you're playing will become much more natural and human sounding. That just makes perfect sense to me because at the end of the day who is going to end up listening to you? Other people of course. So we as guitarists need to make it a priority to emulate the human voice and specifically vocalists. That will breathe new life into your playing like it's nobody's business and I'll write more about that in other posts. This post is pretty much dedicated to the art of hammer ons but I strongly suggest you learn blues guitar as it's such an expressive style.

In essence we have 5 types of hammer ons and the variations and embellishments of these 5 types are limited only by your creativity. Let's look at these 5 types of hammer ons.

Hammering on to a fretted note from an open string.">

What that means is that you play a string without fretting any notes using your left hand and then you pick that open string and hammer on to a new note. This new note that you're sounding is entirly sounded by the left hand.

You can also hammer on to a fretted note from another fretted note as illustrated below.
This is particularly useful when you're playing higher up the neck away from the open position. You can of course hammer onto notes higher up the neck from an open string.
One of the great things about hammer ons is that you can stack them together to produce consecutive notes.
So basically you pick a note once and then hammer on to a new note and then hammering on to another note without picking the string again. So you get three notes for the price of one. Bargain! In the previous example I showed you how to hammer on to consecutive notes from an open string and in this example I'm going to show to how to hammer onto consecutive notes using only fretted notes. The scale pattern I'm using here is a three note per string major scale in the key of G. Go slowly and make sure you don't rush things.
The last type of hammer on I'd like to mention you is the Hendrix Style hammer on. Now Hendrix didn't invent this but he is certainly well known for using this technique in his playing. I think this comes from guitarists wanting to emulate some typical hammond organ style licks. What it comprises of is picking a double stop which is two notes ringing together and then hammer onto a new note from one of the two notes. So you have two notes ringing together where the one note stays the same whilst the 2nd note hammers on to a new note. Awesome stuff indeed!

In other posts and videos I'll show you some more exercises you can use to learn lead guitar articulation techniques and also how to make your own exercises. In closing here are a few pointers.

Always use a metronome. This will help you develop the technique better and at the same time improve your sense of timing.
Go slowly and don't rush things. You're programming new techniques and motions into your hands and you don't want to
"program" in any mistakes.

Try practicing these exercises while watching T.V. Make some music. Don't just leave it at boring old exercises.
Take this new skill and incorporate it into your own playing and make the transition from exercises to music.
That's why we learn new techniques isn't it?

Have fun and hammer on!

To learn more about lead guitar techniques and get access to more lead guitar lessons be sure to visit my Lead Guitar Lessons website

If you're a beginner you can learn Acoustic Guitar Lessons on my other site