Tap This

Commissioned for Hamburg Dialogues 2019 and dedicated to Nicolas Haumann and Martin Donoso Vera, Tap This explores electric guitar as melodic instrument and percussive interface. The title references two-handed tapping—both hands striking fretboard, generating rapid sequences impossible through conventional plucking.

Extended techniques—harmonic tapping, percussive strikes, prepared strings, feedback manipulation—transform guitars into hybrid electroacoustic instruments. Timbral exploration drives formal architecture: clean tones with chorus, overdriven distortion, tremolo-picked shimmer, prepared metallic resonances. The relationship between two guitars remains deliberately ambiguous—tight synchronization, independent trajectories, single composite instrument.