A lot of the finger tapping exercises so far have relied on the open strings. That's great for starting with the technique, but now we need to move more into fretting notes with the 1st finger instead. This gives you more melodic opportunity and helps improve your overall string control a great deal.

Here we start by tapping through a couple of chord triads:

• F# major triad: F# - A# - C#


• G major triad: G - B - D

You can see in the ActionTab, you just move everything up by 1 fret to move from F# to G major, and back down by 1 fret to return to F# major. It's simple stuff, but next we'll extend the exercise to work over some rock backing music. So get used to the triad tapping here first!

Any chord is just 3 (or more) notes played together (3 notes = triad). Now here we aren't playing the notes together (i.e. strumming them). But...we are tapping each note of the chord triad in repetitive order very fast (i.e. playing triplets). This has it's own unique musical effect. Soon we'll look at more specific ways of using that with backing chords.

Just be aware that we are tapping the triads in this order:

F# major: F# - C# - A# (16 triplets)
G major: G - D - B (8 triplets)
F# major: F# - C# - A# (8 triplets)
Repeat (beware there is no obvious 'change' because we are staying in F#!)

NB Triplets are 3 notes played in quick succession. Each set of 3 notes has a value of 1 beat. This generally means that triplets are very fast - perfect for tapping through chord triads!