Adding Hammer-Ons to Your Strumming - Page 6

by Christopher Sung If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that I forgot to show how you apply hammer-ons to the E major chord. The reason I left it for last is that it doesn't completely follow the same pattern as the other chords. For the C, A, G, and D chords, we hammered into the third of the chord. The third is the characteristic note of a major chord, and it really sounds nice when we hammer into it. For an E chord, however, because the third of E lies on the 1st fret of the 3rd string, we can't really hammer into it, as the open string that we initially strum doesn't sound good. So what can we do? We can simply choose another note to hammer on. In this case, it's the B that lies on the 5th string, 2nd fret.