More Advanced Palm Muting

Also, this lesson covers an extension of another playing style, tremolo picking (fast alternate picking). If you need a quick intro to this, take the fast guitar picking lesson.

Otherwise, follow the exercises on this page for more advanced palm mute techniques used by many heavy metal bands. It's just part of the style now.

First, finding your palm muting tone

When positioning your "palm" just over the bridge so it touches the strings, you'll find the further you rest your palm towards the neck of the guitar, the thinner and sharper the muting will sound, eventually becoming just a percussive noise.

Try the exercise below to warmup and try to keep the 1st and 3rd beats dominant in your mind when playing. This helps segment the riff more clearly in your mind for more accuracy (try "1 and 3 and 1 and 3 etc.)

We're in drop D tuning for this, click the tab to hear...

Again, click the tab to hear.

Start slow and build up your speed using a metronome!.

Irregular palm muting fills

Common place in metal are small fills amidst a riff that stray from its regular rhythm. The most common is 3/4 time. Look and listen at the example below for a clearer explanation.

A very effectively used technique with palm muting in most forms of heavy metal.

Let's move onto some machine gunning techniques!

Palm Muting - The Rule of 3

Well, OK, it's not so much a rule, but in thrash and extreme metal alternate picking is commonly used in groups of 3 strokes (triplets) - down up down.

Still resting your "palm" just over the bridge to partially mute the strings, use this alternate picking in bursts of 3...

Simple, 1 2 3 alternate picking, but there are 4 triplets, 1 for every beat of the bar.

Keep your picking hand relaxed and make sure only the nib of the pick scrapes over the string so its movement doesn't get obstructed to much.

This is the foundation of rhythmic scratch guitar - it takes some practice, but use that metronome to gradually build up speed like in the examples above (I'm starting to sound like a broken record here).

Onwards and upwards...

More complex palm muting rhythms

We're still using that foundation alternate picking but this time, to create a more intricate rhythm, we'll position the odd downstroke to juxta the rhythm a bit. Very hard to explain in words so see and hear below...

Used in Slayer's Exile, and a few others, it incorporates that same 1 2 3 grouping technique but by adding those odd downstrokes, the rhythm gets blown out of regular timing.

If playing in a band, the members need to work very tightly together on timings like this to make sure everyone knows when the bar starts and ends.

Galloping palm muted riffs

Galloping?! This technique does sound like it. It's just another way to use the triplet machine gunning technique like before, but this time amidst a regular riff.

This is actually a lot more difficult, you have to stop and start palm muting in strict syncopation or it all goes pear shaped...

One of Sepultura's many great riffs.

If you look at the tab, you'll see those "down up down" symbols again to show you where the alternate picking comes in. This is also when the palm muting should be engaged.

Keep your palm in position ready for engaging, but raise it only slightly when not used so it can be quickly applied again.

Dealing with slower tempos

It's just as important to have accuracy and control at slower tempos. The example below is a brilliantly simple Machine Head riff that uses the slow tempo to create a weighty atmosphere.

This riff uses the machine gun picking we've looked at above, but instead of groupings of 3 strokes, it's in groupings of 5 (down-up-down-up-down)...

Hear me speed up from a slow example

Click the tab to hear...

In a way, this requires more accuracy because the ears pick up errors more efficiently at slower tempos!

Palm muting and lead

It's important to be able to palm mute all 6 strings so you can add some variety to your lead guitar.

With the exercise below we're using the mixed muted/unmuted method on two strings at a time starting with the top two strings which gives the rhythm some drive. The muted strings won't actually be heard too clearly in a fast riff, they just provide a bit of punch.

The red squares indicate where you lift off the muting to strike the strings normally.

Quite a big lesson that, but I hope you've got some ideas and exercises there to improve your timing and accuracy with palm muting.

Final words from the broken record...

• Use a metronome to build up speed gradually

• Listen to different styles of rock and heavy metal and how they use palm muting

• Listen to it with HEADPHONES, the scratch guitar rhythms will be heard much more clearly.

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