PLAY } STAR VIDEO

This issue we welcome the return of Whitesnake’s guitarist Joel Hoekstra. Soloing on Jason Sidwell’s specially-written piece, Excalibur, Joel demonstrates and discusses his eight-finger tapping chops. John Wheatcroft is your guide.

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ON VIDEO

This month GT is thrilled to present an exclusive track from Whitesnake, Night Ranger and Trans-Siberian Orchestra rock virtuoso Joel Hoekstra, soloing over Jason Sidwell’s track, Excalibur.

Joel uses the piece to demonstrate his highly sophisticated multi-finger tapping technique. So much so, that there are no picked notes whatsoever throughout the entire piece, each and every note is produced by either tapping with one of what would usually be the picking hand’s digits, by

pulling-off to a note being held down by the fretting hand or by occasionally hammering on with the fretting hand, relying upon the impact of string on fret to produce a clearly defined tone. It’s definitely worth noting that Joel executes all of these techniques with expert control of handling noise and no extraneous open strings ringing whatsoever, without having to resort to using a string mute or fret wrap. While these devices can be extremely helpful in keeping noise at bay, the downside is that open strings and natural harmonics are not available should you want them, and these are both heavily used approaches in rock guitar styles.