How to Play Pinched Harmonics

Hi! This is Andy James from LickLibrary.com. In this tutorial, we are going to be looking at the good old metal pinched harmonic. We are just going to play a couple of notes just using this technique and then we are going to discuss it. So here we go.

Okay, these techniques are often used when playing metal riffs but sometimes, it is used during sundering as well but the techniques are the same whether you are sundering, whether you are playing metal rhythm, the technique is just initially going to be this. And what you are doing is really simple actually. You just dig in a bit more when you play whatever note you want to pinch harmonic. And then as you play the note, at the same time, you just let in the side of your thumb, just lightly touch the string. If you play a note, lightly touch it. You can hear the common effect that happens when play a pinched harmonic. Some of those high frequencies creep in. It happen a little bit better when you are doing it at the same time so you get more of this kind of feel. So just pick the string and then just allow your thumb to lightly brush the string as well. Now, it is really simple really. But to try and get a really effective pinch harmonic is quite difficult. I mean for me, sometimes I will go for one and it will kind of half get there and it will be a really good one. I suppose it just depends on the angle in which your thumb hits the string.

Zack Wylde is probably the most world renowned for doing it a lot in his riffs and soloing as well. Another person probably not as well known is from Extreme. His harmonics are really kind of aggressive. But he tends to do it more over chords like he play like a barre chord just across the G string – say that you are playing a D that you are just playing the top half of it, you can somehow do pinched harmonics on both strings at the same time to get a really aggressive feel. It is slightly easy doing that across the G and the B string. So you can see what I mean. It is just down to a bit more aggression to your playing.

And also when you are doing double note things like that, it gets a little bit vibrato as well. So when you get the pinched harmonic right, you get the aggression of a vibrato as well. It is definitely worth practicing. I would say it is probably easiest to get pinched harmonic on say the finish strings. Also, it depends on the action as well. If your action is too low, I have found that it is harder to do on guitars where the strings are closer to the neck, then this is further away. I found that if the guitar got a really low action, I find it hard to do a pinched harmonics on the low string. But, just basically practice any riffs that you know or any riffs that you are coming up with and just basically see where you can fit pinched harmonic in. You can jam and try to get some ideas like this. I am just going to play something now for you. So, as you can see, that is a really aggressive style to your rock stroke metal playing.

Okay, this is the end of the tutorial unfortunately but hopefully, you have had fun learning how to do pinched harmonics. Until next time, I will see you later.


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