DESCRIPTION:
How To Do A Hammer On Guitar Tutorial - Easy Hammer-On Guitar Lesson

This is my "How To Do A Hammer On Guitar Tutorial - Easy Hammer-On Guitar Technique" Lesson. I hope you will find it helpful. I on purpose kept things very basic and simple. I know there are already a lot of other guitar hammer on video lessons out there, but most of them focus on fairly advanced hammer on guitar techniques. I wanted to do something that just covers the basic. And, in a first step I wanted to explain to you what actually a hammer-on is. So essentially, you need to think of two notes. Instead of playing them one after another, you would play the lower notes first and then just hammer-on to the higher note without actually picking the string. Just watch the video tutorial above and then it should become pretty clear.

By the way, just to avoid some potential confusion on this topic: A hammer-on and hammer on (without hyphen) are the same thing. However, you might have also heard the term Hammering -- that is essentially a sequence of hammer-ons played fast. Here is a little bit more theory around this topic.

So, technically speaking, a hammer-on is a type of playing technique that is used when you perform songs on stringed instruments. In out example, we obviously focus on how to play a hammer-on on guitar. As explained in the beginning of this article, after you play a note, you would then sharply hammer with a finger of your playing hand to a second note on the same string, which will cause the note to sound. So in essence, it is exactly the opposite thing you would typically do when playing a so called pull-off on guitar.

Of course, advanced guitarist usually combine both guitar techniques, hammer-ons and pull-off -- this allows them to play sequences of notes really fast without plucking or picking the strings. In the context of classic guitar, this is referred to as legato, or legato phrases. It creates a really smooth transition between the individual notes, they kind of flow into each other for the lack of a better term. With that being said, it you want to put emphasis onto how each notes character, you might want to avoid playing a hammer on on guitar. Because the distinctness of each note will blur away. So it's always a matter of what you actually want to achieve as you play a certain passage.

A hammer-on is usually represented in guitar tablature (especially that created by computer) by a letter h. A rapid series of alternating hammer-ons and pull-offs between a single pair of notes is called a trill.
The term hammer-on was first invented and popularized by Pete Seeger in his book How to Play the 5-String Banjo. Seeger also invented the term pull-off.

Okay, playing a hammer-on on guitar takes a little bit of practice. Make sure you come down sharply with your finger on the second note, otherwise it will not produce an audible sound. It is usually not something a guitar beginner takes on, but as you progress along and become better, both hammer-ons and pull-offs will inevitably become part of your guitar playing.

I hope you found my "How To Do A Hammer On Guitar Tutorial - Easy Hammer-On Guitar Lesson" helpful. I will be adding new gutiar videos on an ongoing basis. Come back often to check out on what's happening here:

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Thanks for watching, happy strumming.
Dieter Ulrich Peise
Founder of GuitarIngenuity.com, Acousticalley.com and GitarreGenial.de