THUMPING Tutorial! 3 LEVELS (Examples with TAB!)

hey what's going on guys my name is gabriel levi and we're back again with another tutorial and in this one i thought it was finally time to take a closer look at thumping that's one of my all-time favorite techniques and i've been using it for a little over a decade now and i think i've come up with some pretty cool ways to apply it to the guitar and that's what i wanted to share with you today so some of you might be asking what is thumping and it's a fair question because it's kind of a funny word and i guess it could mean different things in different contexts i don't know but for us it simply means using your thumb like a pick and incorporating other fingers to get different note groupings so the technique was actually invented by reggie wooten who is the brother of bass player and music educator victor wooten but victor was really the one who pioneered the technique and kind of brought it forward to the base community a basis named evan brewer was taking lessons from reggie and he adopted these techniques and started using them in more rock and progressive metal contexts tosan abbasi was in a band with evan brewer and basically saw evan doing all this stuff and was like yo you got to show me how to do that and so tosin started using these techniques on extended range guitar and that's ultimately how it made its way to me i remember seeing a video of him at namm i think he was playing on a strandberg or something and you know his hand was hardly moving but there were so many notes just flying out of the guitar and i'm like i need to figure out how to do that so that set me on a journey that i'm still on to figure out how to use this technique in some really musical ways and in ways that just continue to inspire me so that's the history of the technique as far as i know it and yeah man it was one of those things that really changed the way that i think about the guitar and the way that i approach writing music i will say it doesn't come easy to most people so take your time with it go slow i know a lot of the examples that you'll see is people just absolutely shredding with it but seriously take it slow make sure that every note is coming out clearly and that your rhythm is on point all right grab your guitar we're going to look at some examples and just have some fun with it let's get into it alright guys hopefully you can see everything okay i've tried to angle myself so you can see exactly what my hands are doing but we're going to start exactly where i started and that's with the thumb so we need to make sure that the thumb is giving us the sound that we want before we move on to any of the other fingers so step one is striking through the string in this case we're going to strike through the the low e string and then we're going to land on the a string and just get used to what that feels like so the motion is similar to a slap but we're gonna do a rest stroke on the a string and then come right back up to get the upstroke [Music] the angle of your thumb is important um i see some guys starting out and they're almost doing like a thumbs up and the issue with this is when you go through the string you're almost inevitably going to mute the string that you just went through so i like to keep my thumb somewhat parallel with the strings and when i when i land on the a string i'm kind of pushing down on it a little bit to give my thumb a little bit of clearance and then you can act like the string is a trampoline that your thumb is going to jump off of which is pretty fun all right now we're going to try this on the other strings [Music] i will say the high e string is the most tricky because it's really tiny and you don't have a string to land on once you strike through it so once you get comfortable with that and you feel like the notes are coming out the way that you want them to maybe start applying it to a scale i think the best way to practice any technique is to kill two birds with one stone so let's say that you wanted to learn the e minor scale well play the e minor scale using thumping same applies for any scale the altered scale or harmonic minor whatever you pick the point is that we want to combine this technique with other musical concepts so we're not just focused on mechanics so now we're going to play the e minor scale on the low e string and just use a down up the whole way through [Music] [Applause] [Music] and notice i'm not getting ahead of myself [Music] keeping things the same tempo all the way through and just checking for any inconsistencies so now we're going to take the same scale and play it across different strings so one thing you have to think about is since we're doing two notes with the right hand the number of notes that we play on each string has to be an even number so we're going to aim for four notes per string [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now i think where this technique gets really interesting is when we start applying hammer-ons from nowhere with the left hand and so you're going to see some parallels between this video and my selective picking video because i actually was doing the stumping technique before i started playing around with selective picking before it was ever coined that so we're going to take a g major scale start with a hammer on from nowhere followed by a down up with the thumb and we're going to go all the way until we reach the high e string [Music] one thing i should probably mention is as i'm moving up the strings i'm trying to use some flesh for my palm to mute the strings that i previously played otherwise you're going to get a bunch of strings ringing out and that just doesn't sound good now of course we can take this a little further and do two hammer ons from nowhere followed by a down up and i'll just use an a minor pentatonic scale to demonstrate all right there is one other way that i like to use the down up and it's actually by putting a hammer on between the down stroke and the upstroke let me show you what i mean so we're going to still use the a minor pentatonic scale but when we strike through the first note we're going to leave our thumb where it is then do a hammer-on and then come back up with the thumb [Applause] [Music] now of course you can use as many hammer-ons with the left hand as you want but i wanted to show you how much you can get out of the technique just by using the thumb alone while we're still focused on using just the thumb i wanted to point out one last thing you don't always have to get the upstroke sometimes i'll just get the downstroke and since my thumb is already resting on the string i'll just give it a pop i'm basically just closing my thumb [Music] if you combine that with everything else we just covered you can come up with some really cool stuff that doesn't make you feel like you're stuck inside of a box so one example of using this down pop technique would be something like this we're going to do down hammer up down hammer top all right now we're on to the second step which is getting a group of three with the right hand alone so in order to do this we're going to do a down up followed by a pluck with the index finger we're going to use open thirds in the key of g to practice this so we're going to do a down up [Music] on the low e string followed by a pluck on the g [Applause] [Music] i also think it's really important to practice this on a single string so we're going to walk up the g major scale using thirds on the low e string [Applause] [Music] [Music] make sure to go through and practice this on every string and since we're doing all the notes on a single string your hand is going to be in a much more closed and locked position than it would be if we were spreading the notes out across different strings like we did using the open thirds so just for comparison this is what it looks like on a single string [Music] and spreading it out so you want to get comfortable with your hand being able to open and close depending on how you're applying the notes this approach gets really cool when you start to apply it over chords i don't see a lot of people doing this and i kind of wish i did because it sounds awesome and it's really easy to do so you can take any chord shape that you like i'll use an example from a song that i wrote a number of years ago where basically i'm just using groups of three over the chord and descending with the index finger [Music] [Music] [Laughter] this is also a great opportunity to practice your modes using three notes per string now just like in the previous segment we can add a hammer on from nowhere and follow it up with a group of three i like to use a pedal tone on top of whatever chord i'm using usually an open string so maybe if i take something like d major 7 i'll hammer on the first note follow it up with the down up and then pluck the open b string [Music] [Music] all right we're officially in the final stretch and that's going to be us getting a group of four with the right hand alone i'm also going to include a group of five in this segment just because why not so in order to get a group of four we're just going to go down up pluck so that's down up with the thumb and then plucking with the index and the middle finger [Music] now being able to pull this off is insanely cool and you can get a ton of notes happening with not a whole lot of effort coming from the right hand now of course you can practice all of your scales with this [Music] [Applause] so you can do things like maybe getting a downstroke [Applause] hammer hammer hammer and then getting a group of four [Applause] you can apply it over chords like we did with the groups of three [Music] [Applause] we can also hammer on two notes on different strings so we can hammer on a root and a fifth and then follow it up with a group of four on the a string [Applause] i think we all know what this riff is [Music] so that's a really great one to use when practicing this group of four that was one of the first riffs i ever learned using the technique and it's something that i still play today for anybody who doesn't know that's from a tune called an infinite regression from animals as leaders so i came up with a pretty effective exercise for helping me isolate each one of the movements in a group of four some of the problems you might run into is yeah your downstroke is really loud but the upstroke is really wimpy and the plucks are somewhere in between so we can take something like 16th notes and we're gonna only sound out the downstroke and then mute the other 16th notes and then we would do the same exact thing but this time we're only going to sound out the upstroke [Music] and then again with the first pluck and finally with the second pluck and then i would cycle through each of these for one measure [Music] it's honestly pretty difficult but it'll help you find those inconsistencies across the board so there's one thing i notice when people are first starting out with this technique and it's that when they go for the pluck they tend to grab the string before the previous note was done ringing out and that's going to give you a very choppy sound and you might not have known where that sound was coming from but just make sure that you're timing everything correctly and allowing each note to ring out for its desired duration we can also get a group of five with the right hand alone so that's a down up pluck pluck torque [Music] i probably use this approach the least especially when i'm on a single string but it works really well when you spread this out across other strings so this is from an original tune and i'm basically combining groups of four five and six so i actually grab the high e string with my pinky on this one [Music] [Music] [Applause] so that leads me to the next approach that i wanted to talk about which is taking advantage of how numbers based this whole technique is things started to get a lot more interesting when i was thinking in terms of larger numbers maybe 12 maybe 16 maybe even 32. so this is where you want to bust out the pen and paper and get creative with all the different ways that you can add up to the number let's say 16. if we're taking a group of 16 we can do something like 3 plus 5 plus 4 plus 4. that gives us 16 so we can do something like one two two three four [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Laughter] so there's one thing i did in that riff that i wanted to point out which is grabbing two strings on the last note in our group of four so you can do things like down up pluck and then pluck with your middle and ring finger to complete the group of four [Music] that just opens up more harmonic possibilities and i think it just sounds really cool and i'd love to see more people doing it so as you can probably see you can take this technique and morph it into whatever you want the sky is truly the limit with this stuff so use your imagination be creative bust out a pen and paper and see how many different ways you can add up to numbers like 16 or 32 and i think you'll be pretty surprised with some of the grooves that you come up with things that you would have never done just by jamming in groups of three or groups of four i hope this clears up any questions that you may have had about thumping in general and how you can start to approach it in a more structured way i've basically given away all my secrets so if there's anything you feel like i left out please leave it in the comments below and i may have to make a part two and just as a reminder we are not in a race here so take things slowly make sure everything is sounding exactly the way that you want them to focus on your timing and start making music with this stuff immediately okay now i'm handing this off to you take some of these ideas make something cool with them that's all that i ask have fun guys peace all right guys well that pretty much wraps up this video i hope you've learned something about the origins of this really cool technique and how you can start to use it in your own playing as always thank you so much for watching take care of yourself and i'll see you in the next one peace say bye bye

Channel: Gabriel Levi

Views: 93,521

Keywords: thumping, selective picking, technique, guitar technique, advanced guitar technique, tosin abasi, victor wooten, evan brewer, AAL, Gabriel Levi, music, music education, rick toone, animals as leaders, education, tutorial, guitar, extended range, neural dsp, thump, double thumb

Id: KynAaSJe9xA

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 20 2022