Touchstyle Territory

[ .. reprinted courtesy The Adventures of Bloggard .. ]

Lyon Street, San Francisco, 1987: I loved the synthesizer, and found it easy to read the manuals, to fiddle with the sounds.

Playing the keyboard was something else.

I took two lessons, to learn how to move my hands on the fretboard. I began learning to read, but it was slow.

Then I happily discovered that composition is easy.

First, chords. Staying in the key of C, you just play all the white keys. If you play four notes, skipping every other white key, you get some kind of a seventh chord. If your lowest note is on the C or F note then you’ll get a major chord, which sounds very rich. If your lowest note is on the D, E, or A note you’ll get a minor chord which sounds haunted. If your lowest note is on the G or B note, you get a real sour chord.

So, for starters, you just plunk around with these seven chords, and find a series of them that sounds good. This is pretty simple. The next step is even easier.

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On the Internet, 4/28/2008: At last! Traktor’s old website revamped! The original site, begun in 1996, was hand built, and was truly showing its age. Creaking navigation, broken links, and some outdated content most difficult to update.

A new day a dawning, we’ve upgraded the site to this new, clean look, and will be porting the older content — with some needed revisions — to make it much more accessible than before. And new articles about how to play two-handed tapping, and how to play music, are on the way …

Contributors welcomed. If you have articles or information about how to play guitar or bass with the two-handed tapping method, please contact us.

Please be patient with our growing pains. Thank you for visiting the original two-handed tapping website. The original, and soon, still the best. Stick around. (No pun intended.)