The touch guitar is a stringed instrument of the guitar family which has been designed to use a fretboard-tapping playing style. Touch guitars are meant to be touched or tapped, not strummed.^[1]

The touch or tapping technique was formally codified by American guitarist Jimmie Webster in his 1952 method book called the Illustrated Touch System.^[2]

Webster credited pickup designer Harry DeArmond with first demonstrating the potential for touch-style playing.^[3] Webster himself collaborated with Gretsch Guitars on a guitar stereo pickup design for the Touch System (which fed the bass and melody output to two separate amplifiers), but the concept was not commercially successful.^[4]

Unlike Webster's approach, which was to play on a single-necked instrument, guitarist and luthier Dave Bunker designed, built, and patented (in 1961) the first double-necked, headless,^[5] touch-tapping instrument called the DuoLectar.^[6] While both guitars employed a two-handed tapping technique, Webster used a single-necked instrument while Bunker used his double-necked DuoLectar guitar.^[7]

Webster's tapping technique can be heard on a 1959 record.^[8] In 1960, Bunker first demonstrated his double-necked instrument for the Portland Oregonian newspaper,^[9] and then on the nationally broadcast television show Ozark Jubilee.^[10] His designs ultimately led to his double-necked touch guitar in 1975.^[11][12]

Other designs followed. Among them was the single-neck Chapman Stick (developed by Emmett Chapman in 1970 and produced in 1974^[13]), the single-neck Warr Guitar (first produced in 1991^[14]) and the single-neck Mobius Megatar.^[15] Other touch guitars have included the Solene, Chuck Soupios's dual-necked BiAxe^[16] (patented in 1980 and produced during the early 1980s), and Sergio Santucci's TrebleBass.

Merle Travis occasionally used a tapping style^[17] on his single-neck, strummed guitar, as did Roy Smeck, George Van Eps, Barney Kessel and Harvey Mandell.^[18] Subsequent years have seen Eddie Van Halen, Stanley Jordan, Steve Vai, Jeff Healey, Fred Frith, Hans Reichel, Elliott Sharp, and Markus Reuter all feature the use of tapping techniques.