8-finger tapping? Why not!
Although it is not widely popular, you may have already heard of, or seen this interesting technique at work. As any other technique, 8-finger tapping is a unique way of playing guitar (or bass), and assums using all of your 8 fingers (1,2,3 and 4 on each hand) for playing legato, that is hammering and pull-offs. The main two ways of using your eight fingers are: for soloing (e.g. T.J. Helmerich) or playing one note at the time (monophonic), resembling sax or clarinet players; and for polyphonic playing (e.g. Stanley Jordan), where you can play guitar as if it was a piano, one hand for chords, and the other for melody lines, or playing two lines in harmony at once.
This is an example on monophonic 8-finger tapping:
This is polyphonic 8-finger tapping:
As you can see, 8-finger tapping can be used for a great variety of purposes, such as: scales, arpeggios, sequences, phrases, combinations...
Interested? But, you may be scratching your head wondering how hard is it to learn to play like this, or even maybe thinking that it is impossible, or that you need to be born for this. You see, I know this because the same questions were popping in my mind a few years back. Well, the answer is: it all comes down to will power, and actually how much do you want to learn it. And that is nothing different to any other technique. So that means, 8-finger tapping is nothing more impossible to learn than legato, or picking.
Now, if you would like to learn 8-finger tapping, I suggest checking out my lessons, starting with some basic exercises, like the ones in the '8-finger tapping basics' series.
If you need more info or anything else, just ask me