How to Play Hammer-Ons & Pull-Offs in Guitar Solos

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mike Lais. And on behalf of Expert Village, I bring you soloing tips and techniques. Hammer-ons and pull-offs are really another basic tool that everybody needs to learn to be playing their guitar and when you're playing solos. But alls that is, is a hammer-on is when you start out on a note and you hammer on the next note without plucking. You just simply use the force of your fingering hand to create the note. So, I'm going to pluck the first note, and then just hammer on the second note. Ok? One more time. We'll give you that. Hammer on. See? And that's just with using my left hand. You would do this so that you can have like a little bit faster runs when you're going up and down. And then, for an example, if I were to play like, say, the pentatonic scale, I would just play one per string--one stroke per string here--two notes per string here. Ok? So, now we can combine that with the pull-off, which is going to be just that same act but on the opposite, where I'm playing my note, and I'm going to try and go down one without plucking. I'm just going to simply play the string, and then with this finger, I'm just going to pluck the string and it'll give me the note that I have marked below it. One more time. Just simply pulling it off. One more time. So, that's a pull-off. So, to give you an example, if you want to do the pentatonic scale down, it's just to simply pull off. Ok? So, now if I want to put them together, you also get something that's cool is a trill, to hammer-on and pull-off back and forth. That's it slow. That's all I'm doing. I'm not even doing anything with this hand. It's all my left hand. And those are hammer-on and pull-offs."