This next part, as promised, will be taking our tapping technique and applying it to something more musical. The examples will be easy to play and are designed to show you how you can use 8-finger tapping to get some ‘nice’ sounding riffs.

There are numerous ways to look at “how am I going to apply this?”, but we’ll take it at the basic form, scales. Take alook at the notes in the C major scale:
C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C

Played on the B string, you would have a nice long set of notes to play ascending the neck:

|——————————–|
|-1-3-5-6-8-10-12-13——|
|——————————–|
|——————————–|
|——————————–|
|——————————–|

Let’s take a fragment of that scale, something we would use for regular tapping (the asterisk denotes a tapping with the picking hand, all other notes should be tapped with the fretting hand):

|——————————–|
|-5-6-8-*12——————|
|——————————–|
|——————————–|
|——————————–|
|——————————–|

If we look back to the scale, we see that C is just a half-note away, so why don’t we add that in the tap using our middle finger, aswell as starting the scale over with D and E:

|———————————-|
|-5-6-8-*12-13*-*15-*17—|
|———————————-|
|———————————-|
|———————————-|
|———————————-|

If played at a decent tempo, you’ll get a “happy” sound. That of course, is just one way to look at it. Let’s stay in scales, but add a small twist to it. If you know your relative minors/majors, then you’ll understand this more than those of you who don’t.

Using C major, we know our relative minor is A minor. If we apply the same way of “spreading the notes out”, lets say on the G string, we’ll have close access to another set of notes to use.

|————————–|
|————————–|
|–2-4-5-*7-*9-*10—|
|————————–|
|————————–|
|————————–|

So, we now have two runs that let us use the technique, let’s combine them to make an exercise that will teach you how to move from one string to another while using 8-finger tapping:

For the sake of alignment, I didn’t type out the descending part, but you should do so for practice. When you are tapping with your picking hand, you should move you fretting hand to the next position. When you first try this, play it as slow as possible. That way, you’ll get use to moving your hands around.

This is just one way of using 8-finger tapping. Essentially, you could just call this “Multi-finger tapping”, as you’re not always going to use 8 finger ;D. With this simple rule in mind, try using it with other scales and combine it with other techniques.