Jambole.com – for Guitarists

We covered the basics in the first article (Natural Guitar Harmonics). Now lets apply this to some fun stuff.

E Minor 7th Pentatonic Scale

I’m going to cheat a little bit here and include an F# note as well, just because its a handy note to have in this tonality.

The number in brackets corresponds with the fret to be used for the harmonic. Let me play this out for you.

e-min7-harmonics.mp3

If you get the hang of the harmonics before the 5th fret, you can add another octave to this (see if you can work this one out for yourself!)

e-min7-harmonics-higher.mp3

Harmonic licks and Fun stuff

Lets put on a little distortion and see what kinds of licks we can create.

Here’s a fun one that I keep hearing in rock songs.

natural-hamonic-lick1.mp3

If you have a whammy bar, you can mess around for hours with these things!

How about hitting the 5th fret harmonics on the top E string and on the G string, then dive-bomb with your wiggle stick…

natural-harm-divebomb.mp3

I love the way the 2 strings descend at different rates so you get that “ring modulation” effect with the distortion acting on the 2 notes.

There are loads of string combinations. See what you can come up with.

Tapping and Slapping Harmonics

This is an interesting way of playing harmonics on the guitar. For my ears, this works best with distortion, but you can do this on an acoustic as well. Just tap the string, with either hand, on the 12th, 7th, 5th frets. Don’t hold your finger on the fret, just tap down and take your finger away.

Here’s a simple 4 note pattern, taken from the Pentatonic Scale above. I’m alternating tapping with my left and right hand fingers. I generally position my hands so the left hand works the 7th fret and the right hand does the 12th fret.

left-right-harmonic-tapping.mp3

The nice thing about learning to tap harmonics with the left hand is that it frees your right hand to work the Whammy bar. Give it a go and you’ll see what I mean.

Right handed tapping opens up a whole different world, as you can fret notes with the left hand and then create harmonics above the fretted note, with the right. This is just one method of creating artificial harmonics. I’ll cover these in a future article.