Metal Essentials #5

by Darius Wave

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  • Welcome to the Metal Essentials #5 lesson!


    This particular one is a great link between modern "straight" metal and prog metal. Polirhytmical aproach is easy enough to be handled by intermediate players and will prepare you to upcoming, more difficult prog lessons.

    When most of players hear the magic word "metal", they immedtiately think of palm muting and one direction picking (downpicking/downslanting). Here's a 4th edition of these metal essentials. Because many beginner players have their very first, one and only guitar for all purposes, I decided to make the lesson in a Standard E tuning.

    How to make palm muting? Simply touch low strings with your soft part of the right palm. Spend some time to find a sweet spot moving your palm left and right across the strings. Proper palm muting should have very short sustain, a lot of percussive sound and that specific low boom for a very short moment, 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 much more tight/focused in the midrange.

    Proper amount of gain (only as much as necessary) will be critical 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. Learn the roots of metal guitar playing, inspired by 90's metal bands, like Pantera, Megadeth nad partially hard rock band - Disturbed.


    Gear used (in order of connection chain placement):

    1. Hufschmid Helldunkel guitar with EMG pickups
    2. Presonus Inspire 1394 firewire audio interface (input gain 40%)
    3. Poulin Legion plug-in:
    - Channel - green
    - Mode - Lead
    - All knobs (eq, drive, input etc.) - default
    4. Kefir impulse loader (mix 100%) - You can use NadIR instead for 64bit DAW version.
    5. Impulse - Catharsis 1on_pres5

    Tuning - Dropped B

    Backing track progression :

    4/4 D5 | % | % | % | % | % | % | % |
    D5 | % | % | % | % | % | % | % |
    E5 | % | % | % | Eb5 | Eb5 | Eb5 | Eb5 |
    E5 | % | % | % | Eb5 | Eb5 | Eb5 | 7/8 D5 |
    5/4 D5 | E5 | D5 | E5 | D5 | E5 | D5 | E5 |
    D5 | E5 | D5 | E5 | D5 | E5 | D5 | E5 ||


    Tempo: Main song tempo is 170 bpm. There are also backing tracks available at 70, 85, 110, 140 and 170 bpm.

    Time signature: varible (4/4 7/8 5/4)

    Scales used in this lesson (according to fret layout, not the tuning):

    E blues scale




    E minor scale





    E phrygian scale

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