How To Play the Hammer-On Technique

Guitar playing consists of 19 basic moves, once you know how perform these basic skills you are ready to play anything on guitar. The importance of being able to recognise and perform these moves cannot be over emphasised as they are the foundations of being able to play by ear and developing your own individual style on guitar.

This article will focus on one of the most common guitar moves: the hammer-on.

Hammer-On's

The concept is to have your left hand fingers play extra notes that do not require any additional right hand picking (assuming you are a right-handed player). This produces a smooth melodic sound, very much like a vocalist or wind instrument such as a saxophone.

The technique is very simple: When you pick a note the string vibrates the entire remaining length of the string (if you look closely at the tick strings you will see these strings vibrating) the idea is to select another note on the sane string and hammer-down (hammer-on) to the desired note, with a strong hammer-like action. This produces another tone, higher in pitch, without requiring any right-hand move. Thus you are able to get two or more notes for the price of one picking stroke.

Another way to think of this 'hammer-on' action is to visualise the action of the little hammers striking the strings inside a piano.

Practising the hammer-on technique:

Strike first note with first finger. Hold this note and while the string is still vibrating place your second finger down firmly on the second fret. This will cause the pitch of the note to change resulting in a second note being heard without having to pluck the string with your right hand.

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From Mike Hayes - The Guitar Coaching Guy & the Express Guitar System