Guitar Technique: Palm Muting
Ah yes the great palm muting technique, this is a very popular technique used in metal guitar playing. For an example, Metallica is a band you will find a lot of palm muting technique in almost every one of their songs they have written over the years.
The palm muting technique is not just for metal guitar playing, using this technique in any music genre, can significantly improve your quality of playing. Also, it’s another very simple technique to learn, so let’s start learning!
What is Palm muting?
- Palm muting consists placing the side of your hand or palm on the guitar strings, near the bridge of the guitar. By doing this, it dampens the string or mutes them while trying to pick.
If your using distortion this gives a deeper and much more dark sound to your playing, as you find in the sound of heavy metal guitar playing.
How to achieve palm-muting technique:
- Place the side of you hand down on the strings
- Next, I find the best results are using a power chords, and distortion on you amp will create the best sound for the palm muting technique.
- Also, make sure when you go to palm mute you do not press the strings down to hard, or you will not get the desired effect.
Let’s look at a few examples:
This is taken from a Metallica song called- The God That Failed from the Black Album
Rhythm figure 1 end rhythm figure 1
Eb|———————-|———————-|———————-
Bb|———————-|———————-|———————-
Gb|———————-|———————-|———————-
Db|———————-|———————-|———————-
Ab|-3—2-2-2—3-2-2–2-|-3-2-2—5–2–3-2-2-2|-3-2-2–2—3-2-2–2–
Eb|-1—0-0-0—1-0-0–0-|-1-0-0—3–0–1-0-0-0|-1-0-0–0—1-0-0–0–
P.M…. P.M…. P.M…. P.M…. P.M…. P.M…. P.M…. P.M…
Also, another great example from Metallica is the song For Whom the bell tolls, James Hetfield relies heavy on palm muting during this song, especially the riff that starts at 1:31 in this video below:
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