Palm Muting

Palm muting is a technique very frequently used in many different styles of rhythm guitar, particularly electric guitar focused ones. Even so, it is also a technique very common with many acoustic players and in lead guitar riffs and solos, as well. Just about the only styles of guitar that virtually never use this are fingerstyle players, who would have to severely limit their range of plucking motion in order to use it. This simple technique can create a range of dynamics to a guitar part that doesn’t actually have tone changes, which makes it a very useful skill to be proficient with. It also gives a more chuggy sound, particularly with higher levels of distortion. This chuggy sound has a secondary benefit to sometimes allowing the use of full chords with higher levels of distortion without the more unpleasant, unclear sound full chords normally have with even moderate distortion.

Before actually using palm muting in guitar parts, it is important to have a good basic technique. The palm of the picking hand only needs to rest on the strings, but most guitarists apply pressure, which is especially bad with floating bridge guitars, since it throws the notes out of tune. Think of it like playing a natural harmonic, you basically just need to touch the string in the right place, you don’t actually need to press down. Just place your palm on the string where the bridge and strings touch, and that is it. It sounds simple, but it may take some time to resist the urge to press down hard and to get your hand in the right spot without looking. For guitarists that play more than one scale length guitar, it is important to make sure you can move your hand to the right position on each guitar. If you don’t, you will sometimes find yourself accidentally moving the palm mute too high or too low, both of which are bad.

The example below is just a simple way of practicing this technique. Be sure to work to getting a consistent tone from each strike. This exercise should be done with all down strokes at first. Once you are comfortable with all down strokes, then you can practice alternative picking, but outside heavy metal (particularly the speed metal subgenre), most palm muted parts only use down strokes. Your palm mute hand will likely need to move slightly when you move to palm mute the A string. The key is that the listener should not hear anything but a continuous line of palm muted notes, so don’t lift it too far up if you do.

This technique is very common in a lot of different genres, especially with rhythm guitar parts. The example below is more reminiscent of blues and more blues influenced rock rhythm guitar parts. It is a very simple blues comping line, but these kinds of lines appear quite frequently in some musicians’ songwriting. Most Buddy Holly songs have a guitar part somewhat similar to this example at some point. You can also hear these types of lines in a few Rolling Stones and Aerosmith songs, as well. When playing this time of line, you need to be sure that both notes are palm muted and played equally. If you can’t clearly hear the comping in the part, then you need to adjust your playing until you do.

Sometimes a root note is palm muted, while unmuted notes or chords are added together to form a dynamic. This is much more commonly seen in hard rock and metal, and other more aggressive styles of music. The following example still follows the same basic I-I-IV-I progression the previous examples did, but notice how different it sounds due to the introduction of the dynamics used. When playing this part, be sure that you are playing both the muted and unmuted notes as eighth notes. Sometimes you may feel a tendency to let the unmuted notes ring a little longer, but it is important to maintain the proper, steady rhythm when using dynamics. Lots of parts will lengthen unmuted notes, but this should not be done unless the song calls for it.

Keep on rockin'!