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How to Master the Art of Muting on Guitar

3,395 views · Published 8 May 2018 · 5:39 · Indexed 25 October 2026

Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher · 2018 · Music

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Nick explains why muting is such an important technique and how to introduce it into your playing. 

Is there a technique or skill you'd like Nick to teach? Comment below or get in touch at
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Abridged Script: 

Muting is such an important technique to master as a guitar player and yet it is one that is easily overlooked or underestimated.

Here is a lightning fast tour of just some of the guitar sounds that depend, to one degree or another, on being able to selectively mute strings as you play.

So, this video is the first of a short series dedicated to this versatile technique.

The muted sound is one of the four basic sounds you can get when picking a guitar string.
When we first learn guitar, the sound we concentrate on most is the clean sound you get when you press firmly on the string so that it makes a good contact with the metal of the fret. If this contact is relaxed so that the string partially comes away from the fret, we usually get a buzzy sound, which is very rarely a sound we want to make however, if we relax the finger further, allowing the string to come completely away from the fret but – and this is the crucial point – not removing the finger from the string itself – then we get a muted sound. 

When you first start playing guitar the muted sound is one you normally do your best to avoid, but as shown in the demo near the start of this video, the muted sound has many creative applications both when applied by the fretting hand and the strumming or picking hand. 

In the next video in this series we’ll start looking at some specific fretting hand muting applications in greater detail.

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