Hammer & Reading Guitar Tab

Video Transcript

"MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hello. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. The next topic we're going to take a look is what we call the "hammer." This is the term for when playing a guitar you start with one finger and you've already got it pressed down and you plucked the string whatever string you're on there, and then with anyone of the other fingers you come and you bring it down pretty quickly and it gives the sound of whatever fret you land on. So, if I plucked it directly afterward, so it sounds like I'm hitting two notes but I'm actually plucking once. And the sound actually comes from my other finger pressing down on the next fret or whatever fret I choose to press down on. It's pretty tricky to get down. You really want to get it right on the tip of your finger, that's going to help it get a nice loud sound. Ideally, you wanted it to be the same volume as the original pluck and you want to do it with speed, too. The faster you can move your finger from up to down, the louder it will be. If you take your time with it, it's not going to sound very loud. So, we see this notated in tablature and basically one major way. You'll see whatever note you're starting on and then you'll have a little "h," lower case "h" usually to the note that you want to end on. So, in this case, we plucked 5 and then we hammer on the 7, which actually I just did. It is 5 here and I hammer that 7 on. It can also be done in a series, too. In this case, I have 5 and then I'm going to hammer 6, and I'm going to keep hammering 7 and 8 from there. In this case, that's going to require all four fingers in my left hand. I'm only plucking once here at the 5th though, and the rest of these get hammered on as we go. So, it would look like this. So, I'm 5, I hammered that 6, hammer 7, and hammer the 8. It's a little bit tricky to get some of these consecutive hammers down, but with practice, you can get them just all sound nice and clear and of equal volume. That's really going to come again from using the tips of your fingers. And then that consecutive, and the faster one. That's hammering for the guitar."