How to Play Hammer-Ons Electric Guitar

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Tom. This is for Expertvillage.com. We're talking about shortcuts for playing the electric guitar for rock and roll. And in this section I want to talk about a second trick you can use. That is hammering on; sounds fancy. You might have heard it in guitar circles. All you're doing and we've talked about the pick going down and up, so I hit that one, pick up, pick down, and pick up. Hammering on, what I'm doing is I'm playing down, and I just put my finger there, so I'm letting it ring, and then I put my finger there without hitting the guitar again. So you can see I'm getting the same number of notes, but I'm only picking once for every two notes. Practice this. Try the same scale, and just hit every first note. Like, in other words, any time you're playing a note that's covered by your index finger. And just go up. You can see by doing this and the whole reason that guitarists use hammering on is it gets a little more speed, because you're not wasting time picking back and forth. Okay, so practice that up and down, different fret positions, hammering on that second note."