You know that feeling when a lick is technically correct, perfectly in key, and yet somehow bores everyone in the room including your own cat? That's a line that runs up and down a scale like a well-behaved little escalator. Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal looked at that escalator, ripped out every third step, and bolted the missing steps to the ceiling. The notes are the same. The journey now involves a ladder and mild vertigo.
This little clip is my run at his octave displacement tapping idea: take an ordinary melodic line, yeet certain notes up (or down) a full octave, and use tapping to actually reach the things your fretting hand can no longer grab. The result is angular, jumpy, and keeps the listener's ear guessing about where the next note is going to land. PDF and Guitar Pro are in the description, in case you'd like to inflict this on yourself with actual notation.
How octave displacement tapping actually works
Here's the whole nerdy trick in one breath: octave displacement means you keep the pitch class of a note but change which octave it lives in. A C is still a C whether it's on the low E string or screaming up on the high E — but move it up an octave inside a running line and suddenly a smooth step becomes a giant leap. Do it to a couple of notes in a scale run and the ear stops hearing "scale" and starts hearing "melody with a personality disorder." That's the magic: same notes, wildly bigger intervals.
The reason tapping shows up here is pure geometry. Once you scatter notes across two octaves, your fretting hand physically can't stretch to grab the far ones in time — so the tapping finger of your picking hand jumps in to nail the high notes while the fretting hand handles the low ones. Concrete takeaway: take any boring three-note-per-string lick you already own, pick two notes, and move just those up an octave, then tap them. Don't displace everything — the surprise only works if most of the line stays home and one or two notes bolt for the ceiling. If you want the deeper theory of building phrases like this, my guide to lick creation goes down that rabbit hole properly.
Will it make you sound like Bumblefoot? No. He also plays with a thimble and once soloed on a fretless. But it'll make one lick in your solo jump off a cliff in a good way, and that's a start. Guitar Pro files, slow-motion breakdowns and my other crimes against the fretboard live on Patreon.