Hammer-ons Archives

In Part 2 of this lesson series, we further develop our bass groove with the E minor pentatonic scale and a few built-in moves perfect for pull-offs.

Here’s a quick follow-up to Ryan Madora’s previous “Keep It Groovy” lesson on hammer-ons in the key of E. Ryan reviews the basics of the technique and then adds a few new funky options to help build our groove.

In this lesson, Ryan Madora breaks down the technique of hammering-on. A quintessential element of bass technique, this focuses on our fretting hand and adds plenty of groove to any bass line.

In this video, Ari opens up the idea factory again: Octaves, chromaticism, peppered with slides and hammer-ons. These are tools to make your grooves to come alive!

This week in The Brown’stone on No Treble, we’re talking about expression, articulation, and speed. Rich Brown gives us a couple of exercises that involve using hammer-ons and pull-offs.

Pentatonics using hammer-ons and pull-offs sounds great, but maybe you have noticed that if you stay within the same pentatonic pattern, you can only hammer on certain notes. In an effort to go beyond that, we are stringing two pentatonic patterns together so that we can pull off pull offs from every single note. I’ll show you two major pentatonic...

Here’s a new lick lesson for you, using a good fingering exercise with a Major Pentatonic scale. This is also great for practicing slides and hammer-ons. The fills are mostly Pentatonic, with added flat 3rd (B?) and flat 7th (F). The backing track is a one chord (G7) vamp, but you can transpose it and use it in many blues...

Hammer-ons and pull-offs are extremely handy techniques that add variety to your groove and tone. They each utilize the left hand to perform the next note to allow for some slick fretwork. For this lesson, we have some technical and musical exercises that will strengthen your left hand and get you used to each technique. Don’t miss the tip of...

Here’s a new slap bass lesson for you to try out to incorporate cross-string hammer-ons into your playing. We’ll practice this with a line I put together in the key of E. In the video below, I play the line at full tempo, followed by half speed and finally super slow speed. Follow along with the video and this transcription...

Here’s a simple slap pattern based on open strings and octaves. As I demonstrate in the video, I’m playing a pattern, first in A, and then switching to E (same line). Before switching back to the A, there’s an octave line to bring us back. The line uses hammer-ons and pull-offs. Around the 3 minute mark of the video, I...