Now in this section, we’re just going to look at how to mute strings. Now it is not a difficult thing to master a muting technique. All you are doing is lightly resting your fingers on the actual strings on the fret board. The rhythm hand or the right hand that is doing the thumb and pluck does not need to change whatsoever. It stays exactly the same to the previous lessons that we’ve been learning, the thumb and pluck techniques. All you are doing is instead of actually playing the note, you are just lightly pressing or resting your fingers on to the strings. Then, when you do that, thumb hit off the string, you will get that muted sound. It’s the same with the pluck. If you pluck the string with your fingers lightly dampening the strings rather than ringing out notes, you will get that muted sound.
I'm just going to play a note on the 7th fret A string and we are going to play the B note, then I'm going to play a mute string after each B note.
[Demonstration]
See it’s as simple as that. And to be totally honest, you don’t need to have your finger resting above any note in particular. You can move up and down the neck, just hitting your thumb off the strings like this. And sometimes this is a good way to help you get from maybe one or say if you are playing the G on the E string which is the 3rd fret and if you want to get all the way down to the C note on the A string, this is a good way to kind of get you from one point to another and making it sound continuous.
[Demonstration]
And with that said about the thumb, it’s exactly the same with the pluck, just instead of using the thumb, obviously we’re going to be using the pluck on the D and G string and once again you move anywhere around the neck doing this muting technique.
[Demonstration]
So you can move on to the next lessons now and we’ll actually put these muting techniques to some kind of practice.
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