• Tags:  Metal, Metal riffs, Rhythm

Welcome to the Metal Essentials - Riffs #2 lesson!

When most of players hear the magic word "metal", they immedtiately think of palm muting and one direction picking (downpicking). Here's a bite of those metal essentials. Touch low strings with your soft part of the right palm. Spend some time to find a sweet spot moving your palm just around 1 inch 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 much more tight/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. Learn the roots of metal guitar playing, inspired by 90's metal bands

Additional note:

In the original video guitar has been recorded twice (doubletracking). At some points left and right guitar differ, to create harmonies. While you'll play higher parts, you'll find supporting guitar part in the background of each backing track. It will help to keep things sound proper.

Gear used (in order of connection chain placement):

1. SX SST57 guitar with Seymour Duncan JB Junior pickup on bridge position
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 ||: E5 | E5 F5 | E5 | E5 F5 :||
||: F#5 | A5 F5 | F#5 A5 F5 :||
||: E5 B5 C5 | E5 Bb5 | E5 B5 D5 | E5 Bb5 :||
||: F#5 | A5 F5 | F#5 A5 F5 :||


Tempo: Main song tempo is 100 bpm. There are also backing tracks available at 50, 65, 80, 90 and 100 bpm.

Time signature: 4/4

Scales used in this lesson:

E blues scale




E phrygian mode





F# harmonic minor scale

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