The Apex Shredator: Do the Impossible with Tapping!

The guitar just wasn't designed to play certain lines, at least in the traditional manner. Many relatively simple ideas that can be played with ease on the keyboard, various woodwinds, accordion, zither, didjeridoo, or whatever, just plain suck on the guitar. For the most part, this is due to the fact that huge jumps in range at high speed simply can't be done... with one fretting hand. But many moons ago, some wise guy decided to start fretting notes with their picking hand as well, and over the following decades, quite a few people went nuts with the whole idea. "Tapping" had arrived, and we are going to use it to play an otherwise unplayable line.

First, a little history; imagine, if you will, a 10 year old Apex Shredator, bespectacled and with hair not yet 8 feet long. It is probably about 4am Christmas morning, way too early for any sane person to start opening presents, but goddammit, there could well be a Sega Genesis under that tree, so everybody is gonna get up, if they know what's good for 'em. And after tearing through a bunch of less-desired gifts, there it was... Santa came through. I now had a Genesis, and everybody knows Genesis does what NintenDON'T, suckaz!

Why the story? Well, one of the first games I got was a rather obscure, super-difficult, scary-as-hell-to-a-little-kid number called "Mystic Defender". You played as some guy who definitely did not look like his name was Joe, named Joe, and fought demons and other wacky things only the Japanese could think up. It was awesome, and here's where the article ties in; the music left a big impression on me.

Flash forward decades later. Through the power of the almighty interwebs, I've revisited many of the old games from my youth, including Mystic Defender. The opening music burned itself permanently into my brain 23 years ago, and now that I can actually hear it again, I'm going to play it on guitar, and so are you! Let's listen...

There is a lot of stuff going on there, but we're going to focus on the main ascending line that modulates around. The first time it appears, it uses the notes A, Bb, D, E, and F (not in that order), with the BWWOOOOOW voice playing D, so it's kind of like a Dm arpeggio with E (2nd note from D natural minor) and Bb (6th note) thrown in. You can also just as easily think of it as a Bbmaj7 arp with a #11, or an exotic-sounding pentatonic scale (the "Japanese" scale, if you're a Jason Becker fan); it doesn't really matter. What matters is that it's impossible to play on guitar... or is it?!

After taking a while to figure out exactly what the notes were, I was then tasked with discovering how to friggin' play it. It didn't take long to decide tapping was the only effective weapon to use, and I came up with this fingering; cast your eyes upon its glory!

Fingering-wise, think of it like this; left left left right right left left right, for the whole piece. I tap using my middle and ring for the successive notes, and pinky for the highest ones; so should you! The index finger on your left hand must act as a muting device all the way through; no hair tie nonsense allowed. If you aren't used to multi-finger tapping, I would work solely on the first line, breaking it up as such:

Example 1