Hammer-Ons and Pull-Offs

Hammer-ons and pull-offs are both techniques that allow a guitarist to play a series of notes without individually picking each one. Often, these are good techniques to use in particular types of fast passages, such as in a number of rock solos, but it is also fairly common for many fingerstyle guitarists to use it as well. In that case, it is quite often used to smooth out chord changes by pulling-off or hammering-on into the next chord in the progression. The types of fast passages that call for these techniques in electric guitar pieces tend to be less frequent in acoustic guitar due to most acoustic guitar being slightly less responsive and tending to slur those types of guitar parts. In either case, the technique is performed the same, just the usage tends to change.

Hammer-Ons
The hammer-on is fairly straight forward. You are playing one note, and when you want to play a note on the same string that is on a higher fret, you simply fret the string with enough force to cause that note to start playing. This doesn’t mean that you should whack the fret as hard as possible, you want to hit it with enough force to get it to ring, and that is it. Hitting it too hard can cause slightly less obvious, but still significant, issues than doing it too soft. For one thing, it is a waste of energy and endurance, on guitars with larger style frets you can make the note go sharp by hammering-on too hard, and you can accidentally bounce your finger off the string. The actual difference in tone between using a hammer-on and picking both notes should not be too noticeable unless you are comparing them side to side.

Pull-Offs
Pull-offs are functionally the opposite of hammer-ons. Instead of moving to a slightly higher note, these are used to smoothly move to a slightly lower note. In order to do this, you will need to have the next note fretted before you pull-off to it. Usually, when you have more than one pull-off in a row, you will fret all of the notes before the first pull-off, but there are exceptions that sometimes come up. While pull-offs are functionally used as the opposite of a hammer-on, the term pull-off is misleading, you do not just pull-off the string to perform these. If you do it that way, the note will either be completely muted or, at least, come out very unclearly. When pulling-off, you actually pluck the string with your fretting hand as you remove the finger to start it. Remember, the next note needs to be fretted when you pluck the string, and you don’t want to accidentally lift that finger by being too aggressive with the pull-off motion.

The following example is also the A blues scale, as used in the hammer-on exercise, but this time it is reversed to use pull-offs instead. For the two strings with three notes, you want to be sure that you are transitioning cleanly from note to note. There shouldn’t be much difference between playing it with pull-offs or if you just played it by picking every single note. Be sure that the notes are ringing clearly and you aren’t just trying to lift your finger off the string as fast as possible.

Keep on rockin'!