Beginner Palm Muting - Metal

Welcome to the Beginner Palm Muting - Metal lesson!

Palm muting is one of essential techniques for heavy playing. To get palm muted tone just touch low strings with a soft part of right palm. Spend some time to find a sweet spot moving your hand left and right across the strings. Proper palm muting should have very short sustain, a lot of percussive sound and that specific low boost, right after the hit. From the other side if You move your hand too far to the left, your sound will stay percussive, but will loose an information of what notes are being played, and will loose some of the low boost as well. You also need to find a sweet spot of palm pressure to the strings.

Make sure to use bridge pickup position. It's recommended to have humbucker pickup - it handles more distortion with less noise and it's tighter/more focused in the midrange.

Proper amount of gain (only as much as necessary) will be crucial to keep things clear and tight. Too much gain will destroy good separation between notes, and will make the whole riffing more blurry. Too much gain can cause less effort from player himself, and will affect the overall profit, that could have been taken from the lesson.

Gear used (in order of connection chain placement):

1. SX SST57 guitar with Seymour Duncan JB Jr. bridge pickup
2. Presonus Inspire 1394 firewire audio interface (input gain 25%)
3. Poulin Legion plug-in:
- Channel - green
- Mode - Lead
- All knobs (eq, drive, input etc.) - 50%
4. Kefir impulse loader (mix 100%)
5. Impulse - Catharsis 2off_preshigh
6. Cubase 7.5 equalizer:
- 1.6 kHz -4dB Q=0.6
- 4.46 kHz - 4,9 dB Q=9.3
- 11.47 kHz - 3.5 dB Q=2.5 Low Pass II mode

Tuning - Standard E (E B G D A E)

Backing track progression:

4/4 ||: Em | Em | Em | Em :||
Am | Am | Am | Am |
Em | Em | Em | Em |
Csus9 | Csus9 | Bsus9 | Bsus9 |
Em | Em | Em | Em |
Csus9 | Csus9 | Bsus9 | Bsus9 |
Asus9 | Asus9 | G5 | F#5 F | Em | Em ||


Tempo: Main song tempo is 150 bpm. There are also backing tracks available at 60, 75, 90, 115,130 and 150 bpm.

Time signature: 4/4

Scales used in this lesson:

E-minor scale