Geoff Duncan

A simple solo guitar track called "Blue Eyed Boy" is over in the Tunes section; it was recorded live without any punches, fixes, editing, or overdubs. It's a bit of an experiment in so-called touch style playing, where both hands sound notes by tapping behind frets on the guitar's fingerboard, rather than one hand doing the fretting and the other hand doing (most of) the plucking, strumming, or picking of strings. The technique was pioneered by Jimmy Webster in the early 1950s, and is (mostly) only viable on electric instruments; in jazz, the best-known exponent of the technique is probably Stanley Jordan. Notable players have been exploring the idea, and using two-handed tapping to produce fast note-drenched solos is almost a cliche of post-Van Halen hard rock guitar.

Sigh.

In theory, touch style playing enables a piano-like independence of parts, since each hand is more-or-less free to do its own thing. Maybe one handles bass and/or chords while the other taps out a separate melody, that sort of thing. I never fully bought into that notion, since guitarists have been separating parts for about as long as they've been playing guitars—heck, Doc Watson has no trouble managing independent parts with a flatpick. But I had the thought that touch style might permit a broader dynamic range and independence of phrasing not easily accomplished using traditional playing techniques just because it's difficult or impossible to reach notes more than a certain range apart on a standard guitar. So I goofed around with it a bit, and "Blue Eyed Boy" is one of the results

And I'm still not sold on touch style; like many things, I think it has strengths and weaknesses. I'm not impressed with its facility for so-called independent parts: it struck me as being about the same problem to work independence for touch style as for traditional playing or piano. I do enjoy the separation of phrasing it offers (say, being able to sustain notes with one hand while the other hand plays a run or staccato bits), and think an instrument specifically designed for touch style playing (like a Chapman Stick or instruments from Warr Guitars, Mobius, Dave Bunker, et al) would be even better at it. (I played "Blue Eyed Boy" on essentially an everyday electric guitar.)

No: the main drawbacks I see to touch style playing are dynamic and tonal: the palette of sound a player can summon up from tapping notes, while subtle, is much dryer and more constrained than traditional guitar tones. Sure, there are ways players could expand and enhance that, particularly on dedicated touch-style instruments. (Heck, just pondering, a half-dozen interesting-seeming options spring immediately to mind.) But the nature of the electronics reduces the available dynamic range, and the limited means of exciting a string reduces the tonal possibilities. Not so much as to make the technique or instruments built for it uninteresting or a dead end, but...

Sigh.