Hi, I am Stewart Bull from licklibrary.com and welcome to this lesson on muting. Now when we play rock guitar, especially when we are using a distorted overdriven sound, it is very easy for unwanted strings and notes to ring out. If we do not apply any muting or whatsoever, it can get very odd sound indeed. So what we need to learn to do is mute the notes that we are not playing. Okay, now there are two ways in which I do this. The first way is palm muting where we take this part of the right hand. We rest it on the strings. The further forward we go, the more muted or choked the sound becomes and the further back we go, the less or more opened the sound becomes. What we do by moving is we can find out the ideal place that sounds right to us.
A little bit of palm using, to the palm using depending on the top or the effect that you are trying to get. Now, moving over to the left hand, this can join in the party and help as well. For example if we are playing the seventh fret on the D string, the palm for example at when I picked there, if I do happen to take this hand off, what I can do is use the underside of this first finger to mute those notes. Just allow that second string which is the one I want to come out to ring out nicely. After using these two techniques, it becomes instinctive after all which one you need. Now another one that I do on top of the palm muting and also the underside of the first finger, is for example I am playing that fifth fret G string. I will only use the tip of this finger to rest against the next string. That is normally a combination of three things that work for me. So if I am coming across the neck, as I move across to a new string, this tip of this finger is muting the one there plus the palm muting plus this finger and that way, but for fast runs.
So hopefully when you hear me do that play, those fast runs, and only the notes we wanted rang out, we did not get a lot of unwanted notes surrounding the stuff that we wanted to hear. So I am just going to play with the backing track and show you some runs like that, some palm muting, some left hand music in here and it will work in the real context. Okay, so there you have some plan and uses of right and left hand muting, have fun with it.
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