Much Latin music, especially those genres entwined with jazz, such as salsa, is based on the rhythmic idea of syncopation. This is when a player, whether of a guitar, drums, horn or piano, emphasizes the off-beat, a technique that is key in creating rhythmic, danceable music. So, when playing salsa guitar, especially in the context of a jam, one trick is to simply play the off-beats. While the bass guitar goes back and forth along the root notes, the guitar player can dance around those bass beat notes, filling up the space between them.
During some jam sessions, there is no bass, and the guitar is required to make up most of the melodic structure. If this is the case, the player will have to use every finger to create a complete sound. While the middle finger, ring finger and pinkie are in charge of playing the melody and improvising melodic lines along the top three or four strings of the guitar, the thumb and index finger play the root notes on the lowest two strings. This method takes practice to master, but when executed properly will result in the trick of having one guitar seeming to produce the sound of several instruments at once.
Plucking strings is not the only way to produce music with a guitar. Salsa lends itself perfectly to alternative methods. Because the salsa is deeply rhythm based, even the guitar player has the duty of providing a percussion beat. The guitarist can slap the body of guitar in between beats of plucking or strumming, with anything from a light tap with the fingernails to a hard slap with the palm. This technique adds to the already complex percussion and can be visually enjoyable for a live audience as well.
Like many genres, salsa features its own forms of open-tuning. The idea is to tune all the strings so that when the guitar is strummed with all the strings open, the result is an actual chord. This same technique has been used by slide guitar blues musicians to enable them to play entire chords simply by holding a bottleneck across the strings. One style of tuning found particularly in the Cuban son variation of salsa is called "open C," in which each string of the guitar is tuned to one of the three notes of a C major chord, C, G or E. On a typical six-string guitar, the tuning is C-G-C-C-G-E. On the three-string Cuban guitar, the tuning is simply C-G-E. This tuning is especially helpful in playing the root bass notes, while plucking the melody on the higher strings simultaneously.