Stanley Jordan is a classically trained pianist and guitarist, who, early in life, wanted to harness the freedom of piano playing for use on guitar. He enjoyed the way his different hands could operate independently on the piano, and wanted to imbue that into his chosen instrument. He even dreamed up inventing an entirely new electric instrument that looked like a guitar but consisted of hundreds of different buttons that would create different notes, but didn’t have funds to create it fully because he was a teenager at the time. Later, he discovered other inventors had the same idea, creating instruments like the Zitar.
Jordan ended up going in a different direction to get the sound he wanted. Instead of buttons, he employed a tapping technique, where he only needs one hand to create each note rather than two. That allows the artist to play notes with two hands, rather than using one hand for strumming or plucking. He can also play two guitars at once, or play guitar and piano at the same time. There’s this amazing older video you can watch to see Jordan describing his technique here.
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