Eric Peterson's Practice What You Preach Part 1
Hey, what’s up? This is Eric from Testament and the next couple of months, we’re going to be talking about playing rhythm guitar and just crunching away down picking, doing some chord progressions with it. And also explaining some pull-offs and stuff that work really good together and then maybe even later, playing a couple of pieces that go together. So, I’m pretty excited to do that.
Tuning wise, I’m tuned the Eb right now. The reason I do that is it’s a little bit – it’s a half step from E and it gives a little more of a heavier sound. A lot of it -- older bands does it like Black Sabbath, Slayer, Testament, and it’s as if you got the tightness of the chord to get your crunch without getting too floppy. And by the way, here’s Ida if you wan to play along. And of course, you would tune accordingly down so.
The next thing I want to talk about is down picking versus going back and forth like – or. The down picking thing works well because you get more of the muted, really solid muted sound and also you get a harmonic which you don’t get with when you’re going up and down, They are both great but depending on what you want to do.
The down picking thing just gives it more like a crunch for instance like, “Am I Evil?” If you played it – versus --.As you can tell, you get more driving crunch tone and a lot of people in the trash metal genre like to do a lot of down picking. The problem is when you get to fast, I think you lose some of the integrity in it and you end up doing like a faster lick. There’s no way you can go down picking going on. It’ll be like --. You just go and be able to do it so.
Yeah, down picking thing is really cool especially for just mid-tempo stuff. For Testament, a lot of them for the mid-tempo stuff, we use the down picking like for instance, “The New Order”.
So now, if I didn’t down pick it, it wouldn’t have that same crunchy “jan, jan, jan” sound. It would be more like. It just gets a little bit sloppier. So, the down picking thing is really essential for metal I think. You just get that real -- it’s also harmonic thing the way I hit the strings. A chord progression should be like -- versus like --. I kind of get like harmonic on it and you get that --. Then, if didn’t do it down picking it would be like --.
So that’s a good thing to practice out here.
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