Unlocking the Secrets of Palm Muting: Essential Techniques for Guitarists

Introduction to Palm Muting

- All right you guys, what's going on? Dave, with BeginningGuitarOnline. Welcome to this week's episode on palm muting. Now this will be especially important for anybody that's looking to have a little bit of control on timbre. If you want to do metal and you want to really, you know, chug, this is episode is for you. So we're going to start with the, sort of the metal powered rock application first, just to get that really thick percussive tone. And then we'll talk a little more nuanced later about other applications. So, you know, doing it on acoustic or clean tone. So yeah, so palm muting. If you want a really thick, chunky rhythm tone, this is something that you're going to have to master.

Demonstrating Palm Muting

Essentially, what you have to do is, instead of having the guitar sound like this. Doing an E5 power chord here, so open E string, and first finger, second fret on the A string. And again, so open, it'll sound nice and thick. You hear all of the tones are open in there. So if we put our palm down and mute it with the edge of our palm here, you get more of that sound, right? So you can hear how much more, you know, how muted that is. It's not that wide open sound. It's more of the, hm, kind of sound.

Metallica's Influence and Technique

Now anybody who, you know, I'm not going to get into that. That's going to be a whole tone thing, and that'll be a rabbit hole. Yeah, later we can talk about gates and signal chains, and setting things up to get you really, you know, heavy sound. But for this, we're talking guitar, distortion pedal, amp, that's it. Yeah, so one of the things that I was introduced to this to was all of my favorite kind of Bay Area thrash bands, Metallica, Slayer, Machine Head obviously. Love those bands, love those sounds, that really chunky. ♪ [music] ♪ - Now one of the things that sets Metallica apart for that really thick, chunky sound, and you'll hear this a lot in modern metal bands, but there is a physical limit to it is play all down strokes. So here we'll take a listen to the difference between alternate picking, up/down on the open string. Versus all downstrokes. Now we'll do the same thing, but with a little bit of palm muted on there. And you can hear the difference, and you tell me whether or not it sounds heavier, all right?

Palm Muting Technique Explained

So alternate tuning, or alternate picking with the palm mute. Versus all downstrokes. So that's just to give you an idea of the way it sounds, right, the timbre portion of it. Now this is going to be important if you're going to eventually, down the road, try to play a Metallica song, like you know, "Master of Puppets," or anything like that where, you know, personally I find it more comfortable to play the lick alternate picking. But if you want to play it true to form, Hetfield plays all downstrokes, which you know, you need a different level of picking arm dexterity for that, which is something to call out.

Applying Palm Muting

Okay, so I've talked about different use cases already, and how you, you know, how you already apply it, the sound you might be familiar with, all of that. But how do you actually do it? And it literally is as simple as placing, you know, the side of your palm right here onto the strings. How hard, right? Now, that might be your next question is how hard do you do that? Well I'll start by just sort of chugging an open string, and then I will slowly place it on, and go harder, and harder, and harder until it basically, you know, kills the sound, okay? ♪ [music] ♪ - Now for me, what I was doing there was I had my hand right basically above the bridge here. And I call that out because that's a really nice place, if you are palm muting, to just leave your hand, and kind of just anchors it there. Even if you do some more floaty kind of picking, right, when you, you know, when you get to more of the solo stuff. That right there is, you know, me doing my alternate picking there. But having my hand kind of anchored on the bridge while doing a little bit of palm muting while I play. So that, you know, affects the tone. It allows you to get really, really fast picking, and it just works out totally.

Finding Your Unique Palm Muting Style

So you can see, you know, I can't tell you the via YouTube how hard it is to play, what's most comfortable, how best to do it. You need to just try it out. So again, you know, find the bridge. If you have a, you know, the Tune-O-Matic bridge here, like the Les Paul, or you know, you're playing something like a Strat or a Floyd, you can still use the bridge as an anchor point. But find where that place is comfortable. You know, some people might rest a pinkie on the pickup. That's fine in certain sit cases. I wouldn't recommend, you know, getting used to that all the time. But you know, in certain cases. And just start to play with it. Now if you go to the middle of the string, you'll hear a little bit of a different sound. So you know, here's by the bridge, versus middle of the strings. So again, you can hear how much more dead that sound is. That could be useful if you really want that percussive sound. Maybe you're doing some funk. Maybe you're doing, you know, just some percussive hits with the drums, whatever it is. That's another great use for that.

Palm Muting in Clean Tones

All right, now for clean tones, it's the same thing. Now you're not gonna get that really, necessarily that super chunk tone because you don't have all the distortion and all the harmonics, you know, within that distortion. But again, you know, I gave a shout out to Aldean Yola here, and he's a great example of how to use some palm muting as a timbral piece, right? So again with that lick here that I did. So there I wasn't really palm muting. You can hear how that changes as I put my hand on the string, and then a little off, all right? Now, one thing that you can do is, you know, palm mute the bottom, and then do a different lead line. So something like, you know. ♪ [music] ♪ - That's an example, you know, any of that kind of stuff.

Conclusion and Tips for Practice

All right, so hopefully you got something, a little bit, out of this, whether it's with the