Palm Muting Tutorial - Learn How To Palm Mute For A Beefy Guitar Sound

Hey, guitar enthusiasts, welcome to my palm muting video. What I'm going to show you is a very, very popular technique that's used a lot in rock songs. And it gives you this really chunky and beefy sound. It's called palm muting, and it sounds like this. It's got this really beefy and dark sound. And the cool thing about palm muting is it adds a lot of really cool dynamics to your song and to your playing. You can acc.

So add some really cool dynamics and variety to your playing instead of just playing eight notes, like straight up. So how we go about finding this on the guitar is there is a sweet spot for where we need to play. And what we're doing is with our strumming hand, we are playing with the side of our palm resting on the strings of our guitar. And that's what creates this muting sound. That's why it's called palm mute. So what we're going to do is there's a sweet spot on your guitar that exists just in front of your bridge. So if you're an acoustic guitar, you've got your pins with your pegs here with the. With the bridge piece, and you can have your strings. It's going to be right in front of that. Some electric guitar players, you'll probably have a saddle that you can put your hand right in front of. It's usually between the bridge and your bridge pickup. So you're going to have to play around to find where the sweet spot on your guitar is. But I tell my students, so if you're an electric guitar player, you're going to want to start by your bridge pickup. Or if you only have one pickup, just start by where the bottom of the neck of the guitar meets the body. And for the acoustic guitar players, you've got a nice sound hole that you can start at. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put my palm, this section of my palm resting on just the top three strings. And you'll hear I'm not really getting any sound because this is not the right spot to do palm muting. I'm going to move my palm, I'm going to slide it slowly down the guitar.

Ooh. Until it warms up. Do you hear that? Hear that change? So here it is. I'm going to start right by my sound hole. I get nothing. Nothing. Starting to change.

Ah, there we go. So it's going to warm up to this nice chunky section. And it's usually just before the bridge of the guitar. Let's try that one more time. Start at your sound tall. Make sure that the palm is resting flat against those strings. Because if it's not, we're going to get string noise and we don't want that. So rest that palm right on those strings. Start picking and strumming.

All the way down. There we go, until it opens up. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in for a close up so that I can show you guys exactly what I'm doing with my palm where it's sitting. And hopefully that'll give you a better view to figure this out on your own. Usually takes my students a few weeks to really get this down pat and figure it out. So don't worry if you don't get it right away. Just practice. So let's go in for that close up. Alright, so here is the body of my guitar and I'm kind of sitting at an angle because I want you to see how I'm placing my palm on the guitar. You see, I'm not placing it flat, flat kind of on the side here. So I'm really using this part of my palm and I'm resting it on the guitar. Here it is by the sound hole and I am picking, trying to get my. Here we go. If I get my fingers out of the way, you can see it and I'm just sliding.

Down until I find that nice chunky spot. So my palm is mostly resting on these top three strings because that's really what I'm focusing on. If you go down and get like a D chord, you're going to have to move your palm to mute.

To D.

Back to G. So you see I'm moving my palm to mute what I need. So again I'm just using pretty much this part of my palm, of my hand, of my strumming hand. So as you see, I'll put it. Here's my bridge, my guitar bridge. I'm going to put my palm right in front of that. It's almost directly immediately in front of this bridge. For you electric guitar players, you should have a bridge, whether it's a floating bridge where your strings are towards the bottom of the guitar. You should have a saddle or something that you can put your palm right in front.

And you'll see that you can with the guitar by just lifting the palm off the string. So I can mute the strings.

And then I pull. I'm over exaggerating a little bit here to show you, but 2 and 3 and.

So you can do lots of cool, really dynamic strumming stuff with this palm muting technique. So make sure this is going to take some practice. It usually takes a few weeks for my students to get this down, but the key is finding that sweet spot, starting up high, close to the neck on the strings, and sliding it down.

Until you get that nice chunky sound. If you're hearing this, it means you're not muting the strings. So again, it's the palm, right on the strings.

Right here on the bridge.

You get a nice chunky sound.

And that's the basics of palm muting. So give it a try, and I hope you guys have luck with it.