“I played the tapped section on the demo almost as a joke, but my engineer said, ‘That has to be on the record!’” Tapping on a country album? Don't knock it ’til you’ve tried it, says Andy Wood

Andy Wood.

Free Range Chicken, from my latest album, Charisma, has a challenging solo, which is fun, highly unusual and instructive, as it begins with a deluge of notes that are performed with various fretboard tapping techniques but in a country-style setting.

The eight-bar guitar solo shown in Figure 1 can be viewed as two four-bar elements. Bars 1-4 are articulated with fast, quickly shifting tapping patterns on the top three strings, and bars 5-8 are played in a conventional manner with alternate picking.