Seriously awesome instrument tricks

[Forrest]

Here are a few of my favorite tricks, all self-discovered:

These few involve pick scrapes.

The first is string-hopping. You can scrape on one string, hop to another and scrape the opposite direction. Pretty simple.

The next one is sort of like tremolo picking, but it has a different sound. If you scrape three or four coils of the string right down by the bridge, you can fret notes, and it has a tremolo-picking-like feel. Very fun.

My favorite scraping trick is fretting high notes on the low E or A string and scraping the string and switching notes. Sounds best with a diminished or minor pattern. I prefer diminshed.

All of these sound best on the clean channel with your preferred amount of delay going.

This is a trick I discovered today, and the story to go with the discovery. I was up in our shop, playing, and my brother was in the room running a drill. I was messing with my delay pedal, soloing over a little loop I had going, and I kept hearing this wierd noise. I realized the noise happened whenever the drill ran, so I grabbed the drill and started screwing around. When you put an electric motor up to your pickups, it makes an electric motor sound, among other things. You can move it around to get a flanging effect and stuff.. it's really cool. I had heard about Adam Jones of Tool using this trick, but it didn't even cross my mind until I realized I had heard some of the sounds I was making on a Tool song. I went home and popped in Lateralus, and sure enough. I haven't tried it with delay going, or with distortion. I am going to try that later. I will be using most of this stuff at Crab Fest, so if you want to see/hear it, be there.

[cifirrekcuT]

Pick sweep the strings above the first fret and finger some of the harmonics.

And if you take a violin bow to your cymb...

Nevermind.

[Forrest]

You can also hit a harmonic or two and bend the corresponding string(s) above the nut, on the headstock. This sounds good with volume swells and a fairly fast (700-900 ms) delay.

[sleepyhead]

Tuckerrific said:

And if you take a violin bow to your....

guitar, with a lot of reverb, you get a cool sound when you hold chords.

[Forrest]

Jimmy Page did that I believe.. didn't someone else do that too? Some obscure band.. you probably listen to them, Andrew. I used to have a tape of a live show by them. I don't remember who it was. It was poor quality, but it was cool.


Edit: Oh yeah, wasn't it Sigur Ros? Also, I meant the recording was poor quality, not the performance.

[YETI]

theres this really cool thing i discovered how to do a while back...you take a pick(preferably some type of plastic) and hit the strings with it, and with your other hand you push down by the lines on whatever string your hitting with your pick. you can even do more than one string.


its pretty freakin insane

[sleepyhead]

remote controls for tv's and vcr's make some cool sounds when pointed at the pick ups. also those little matchbox cars that make sound are picked up by the...pick..ups...

[YETI]

thats really weird..cus just last night i was playing guitar with my stereo and i pressed the next song button on the clicker and it made a really funny sound in my amp. it took me a while to figure out what it was.

[Forrest]

The cars you roll back to wind up? I think I heard about that somewhere. Maybe you told me.

[cifirrekcuT]

If I hit the rim of my snare at the same time as the skin, it makes the drum ring more and makes it like twice as loud, but it's more damaging to the middle of the stick.

[Justin Leedy]

A few weeks ago I figured out how to make R2D2 noises with my guitar. You don't need any effects or anything, but it works best with really high-gain distortion. All you have to do is select your bridge pickup, mute the strings with your left hand, and then take a nickel or a penny (no ridges on the sides) and whack the edge of it against the unwound strings in between the pickups. You can make it sound like it's saying something by sliding it up or down quickly and by switching strings randomly. It's a whole heap of fun.

[Justin Leedy]

Another fun trick I just remembered is one that makes the guitar do the sound like when Pac Man dies. I learned this one from a Rusty Cooley article and it also makes a good exercise for right-hand tapping. What you do is, line your left hand fingers up on the high E string with your first finger on the tenth fret and your pinky on the thirteenth, then line your right hand fingers up on the same string with your first finger above the fourteenth and your pinky above the seventeenth without actually fretting the notes. If I explained it right, you should have one finger on each fret of the first string between the tenth and seventeenth. Then (this is where the fun starts) you tap onto the seventeenth fret with your right-hand pinky and pull it off to sound the string at the thirteenth fret with your other pinky. Next, tap the sixteenth fret with your right hand ring finger and pull off to the twelfth fret played by the left hand ring finger. Keep going in this fashion until you have sounded the D note at the tenth fret then move the entire pattern to the second string and start over. If you get it going really fast and go all the way down to the low E it sounds just like the video game.

[cifirrekcuT]

Wait... I tried this, but I don't know what my left index is supposed to do. But as far as I got, it sounded pretty cool and quite accurate.

Can you muster more clarity? I love tapping.

edit: my ex-tae kwon do instructor and I used to hang out after class and talk about guitar. I guess he used to play buttrock/metal(whatever) in high school.

[Justin Leedy]

For your left index, it just kind of floats there until you tap with your right index, then you pull off with your right hand finger (fourteenth fret) and let the string ring out at the note your left index is already holding. It's pretty standard tapping fare.

[cifirrekcuT]

Aaaaaaaaah... yes

That's pretty tough. Tap with the right, pull of ringing the note with the left corresponding finger all the way down both hands, then again on each string, yes? Four taps per string?

I was trying this at the music shop, couldn't get it, so now I'm here reading about it again. But I found a riff up there that I liked. I'll keep it and name it after you, Leedy.

[Justin Leedy]

Sounds like you've got it, Tucker. That's really just an exercise to get your right hand fingers able to tap quickly and in rhythm so you can play more musical things. Another one I play that's a whole bunch of fun and is also impressive to watch and kind of mind-blowing to listen to (I didn't make it up, so I'm not bragging) is to add multi-finger taps to the top end of a sweep-arpeggio. Like if you take an A minor arpeggio for two octaves starting at the twelfth fret of the fifth string and ending with the left hand pinkie on the high A at the seventeenth fret of the first string, you can add the third and fifth to the chord by tapping with your right hand middle finger and pinkie at the twentieth and twenty fourth frets respectively. If you can get it smooth and on tempo, it sounds like you just swept a three octave arpeggio across an eight string guitar. The idea is to tap without sounding like Eddie Van Halen all the time.

[cifirrekcuT]

I'll work on Pac-man. But maybe I'll ask you about this one in a couple years.

[Forrest]

I like tapping on the wound strings. It sounds really awesome.

[Justin Leedy]

I can't remember which song it is, but there's one Slayer song that, while Jeff Hanneman plays a solo, Kerry King does a tapping riff on the low E instead of playing a normal rhythm guitar part. It sounds really badass.

[Forrest]

As opposed to goodass. That's what Simple Plan sounds like. Goodass.