What Is Guitar Palm Muting - Palm Muting Guitar Tutorial
4,056 views · Published 24 January 2016 · 4:09 · Indexed 20 September 2026
Channel: Ulrich Peise · 2016 · Music
What Is Guitar Palm Muting – Palm Muting Guitar Tutorial Thank you for watching my video: “What Is Guitar Palm Muting – How To Palm Mute A Guitar Tutorial”. I hope you found it helpful, but if you have any questions, just let me know. Here is a link to a comprehensive info post I put together on palm-muting: Insert link here. Alright, so just to summarize a few points that I had touched upon in this video. First of all, let’s answer the question: what is palm muting actually? Guitar palm muting is a playing technique where you touch the strings of your guitar lightly with the palm of your strumming hand, close to the bridge of your guitar. You would use the part of your palm right under your pinky. Essentially, you do the expect same thing you would do when playing your guitar regularly, except with palm muting, you cover all six strings of your guitar with your palm. When you start learning to play guitar palm muting is typically something you don’t need to worry about – so, if you just picked up the instrument, this is something you want to put on the backburner for a little while. Because while not necessarily very difficult to do from a technical perspective, palm muting is something that a beginner doesn’t have to bother with far a little while. Now let’s talk about what guitar palm muting is actually good for – of what’s the purpose of doing a palm mute on guitar? As I had explained in the tutorial, I think there is a two-fold reason (not to say that there could be other/more reasons, too): first, it allows for an additional level of control over the tone of your guitar. This is very important when in the context of palm muting electric guitars that are played with a lot of distortion and gain. Typically, you will get a lot of background noise and feedback and the palm muting technique allows you to reduce all of that. Because by just slightly touching the strings with the palm of your hand, you prevent them from swinging/ringing freely – in other words, you damp the strings and therefore you can control the background noise. The other purpose is to accentuate certain notes and riffs. For instance, let’s say you play a scale of 12 individual notes. By the time you get to your third note, the first and second one are still audible – to be clear, I’m making this up as an example just to make the general point – however, by muting the strings, each note will only be audible for a very short amount of time. It creates a different kind of sound. Especially if you like to play with a lot of distortion and fast palm muting is something that can help to ‘articulate’ and accentuate the individual notes. So, how hard is all of this? Really not all that much. It of course takes a little bit of practice. But it almost comes naturally after a while, at least that’s what happened to me. And by the way, I think it’s fair to say that in the vast majority of cases, palm muting your strings is something that’s associated with heavy Rock and Metal. Even though, it’s not confined to these genres, because palm muting acoustic guitars can make a lot of sense, too, of this is the sound you’re going for. Okay, that’s about it. I think a very good palm muting exercise is playing the intro of Paranoid, because as demonstrated in the video, it combines regular strumming with parts that are palm muted. Start out slowly, though, and gradually increase the tempo. Pay attention to how things sound. It takes a little bit of practice, but after a while it will become second nature. If you have any questions about this, leave a comment below. Thanks a lot again for watching this video.