Andy McKee – Percussiveness

Andy McKee – Rylynn

Hey, I invented a new word… Here’s Andy McKee, one of the undisputed heavyweight YouTube champions whose got over 24 million views with this song called Rylynn.  Great playing of course but, if you look up the categories I choose for this Andy McKee video, I have not choose “tapping” as one of them. Why? I’m sure a lot of you consider this to be tapping guitar..?

I know Wikipedia is not always the best place to get info but I thought whomever wrote the following did a great job of explaining it..

“Tapping is a guitar playing technique, where a string is fretted and set into vibration as part of a single motion of being pushed onto the fretboard, as opposed to the standard technique being fretted with one hand and picked with the other. It is similar to the technique ofhammer-ons and pull-offs, but used in an extended way compared to them: hammer-ons would be performed by only the fretting hand, and in conjunction with conventionally picked notes; whereas tapping passages involve both hands and consist of only tapped, hammered and pulled notes. Some players (such as Stanley Jordan) use exclusively tapping, and it is standard on some instruments, such as the Chapman Stick.” read more

Andy is hitting his guitar on the 2/4 in the video, just to add a beat. But other than some artificial harmonics towards the end of the song, this is not really tapping guitar. I’d call it fingerpicking with some slight percussiveness…. wow, there’s that word again.