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If you've ever heard a guitarist tapping guitar harmonics, then you already know that it does create a beautiful sound especially when done on a clean sounding guitar. However, you can do this method on a distorted guitar as well and create equally cool sounds.

Edward Van Halen is definitely someone who has taken this technique and created great sounding music with it, as well as broadening the horizons on what can actually be done with tapping guitar harmonics.

When it comes to tapping guitar harmonics, I find that many of my students don't quite understand where to actually tap the fretboard to get the sound to jump out, and also don't understand how to actually tap the fretboard to bring the sound out. There's a couple of things you need to keep in mind when tapping guitar harmonics.

1.) You need to tap over the top of the fret wire itself, not between the frets.

2.) You need to "pull" the sound out of the fretboard, not "push it in.

These are the two big problems that most guitarists face when it come to tapping guitar harmonics. Though there are many different areas on the fretboard that you can actually tap harmonics from, we are going to look at 4 simple spots to work from. This will be all you need to work on the technique, and from there you'll be able to expand as far as you want and experiment with all the strings in any location on the fretboard.

Rule Of Thumb: Anywhere you hold a note down on the fretboard with your left hand, you can tap over the top of the fret-wire 12 frets away and create a harmonic. With that being said, you can create different pitches if you tap over different frets. Some frets are more delicate than others to get the harmonics to jump out, but with practice you can just about get a harmonic to jump out of any fret, anywhere. This takes time to master, but well worth it.

EXAMPLE: Fret the 3rd string on the 5th fret and keep your finger there, don't move it. Now, tap over the top of the 10th, 12th, 14th, 17th fret-wire. If you've done this correctly you should hear 4 distinctly different harmonic pitches jump out. If you don't hear them you probably need to work on pulling the notes out of the fretboard rather than pushing them in. This is probably the hardest part to master. Just keep tapping until you hear the harmonics start to happen. You'll eventually latch on to the technique that you need to use the harmonics to pop out.

Another cool thing to experiment with when you get the hang of it, is to bend the note with your left hand as you're tapping the harmonics with the right hand. You can really expand on the possibilities with this one little extra trick thrown in.