Electric Guitar Lesson – Make Your Riff Heavy Using Plam Muting Technique

What is Palm Muting?

Palm Muting is the most frequently used technique in rock and heavy metal songs. It produces heavy grind and chunk sound that crank up the amp when using a high gain distortion, therefore the results is really heavy.

Palm muting involves the dampening of the strings on your guitar with the edge of your picking hand. Place the edge of your picking hand onto the strings as if you wanted to mute them between the bridge and the first pickup close to the bridge.

Use your pick and pluck at a given string or power chord. Hold your pick slightly downward just like you’re slicing the string and create a grind on the string.

Find the sweet spot that makes your sound the heaviest and the crunchiest possible. You can get different sounds, depending on how far from the bridge you are palm muting. Experiment with it. The further you are from the bridge, the more you will mute the strings, which has a more percussive, drum-like feel. Moving towards the bridge, or even resting part of the edge of your palm on the bridge, makes the muting effect lighter. 

The amount of pressure you apply onto the string with the edge of your palm greatly influences the sound. Experiment with it, notice how you can get fuller sounds with a lighter palm mute, and more percussive sounds with heavy muting.

Turning up the gain on your distortion effects really brings out the crunchy sound of palm muting.

These are some great applications when you apply palm muting technique on your guitar playing

- You can vary between using and not using palm muting at any given point in the riff. This can be used to increase the rhythmic effect as well. All you have to do is raising your palm slightly, and then lower it back onto the strings when appropriate. 

-  You can also use Palm muting with a single string (low string) alternate picking attack as your left hand finger fretting.

-It is also great with an open E string run using a single string scale.

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Tags: Electric, Guitar, heavy, lesson, Muting, Plam, Riff, Technique, Using