Why You NEED To Master Palm Muting on Guitar

In this video, I'm going to teach you a technique that is going to drastically improve your guitar playing skills using a strumming pattern. You probably already know.

Students in my seven level guitar system ask me all the time, Lauren, how do I make my strumming sound better? How do I make it sound more exciting? And one of the first skills that I usually teach them is a technique called palm muting. You. It's a simple yet effective technique for creating different dynamics in your playing. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you exactly how to go about finding the sweet spot on your guitar, because every guitar is different. And then I'm going to apply this to a few strumming patterns to just show you how this really can spice up your playing. So first things first. The actual technique of palm muting, the hardest thing is finding the sweet spot. So what we're doing when we palm mute is we're using the palm of our strumming hand. So if you're right handed, it's going to be your right hand. If you're left handed, it's going to be your left hand. And it's this fatty part of the palm here, right below the pinky. That's what we're going to be using. And what's going to happen is this fleshy part of your palm is going to sit on your strings, usually very close to the bridge. And when you play the guitar, I just have an E minor chord set up over here on my fretting ham. If you strum a chord regular, it sounds like this.

But if you palm mute.

It gets this really beefy kind of chunky sound out of your guitar. Some of you that are fans of Neil Young might have heard that sounding a little bit like Heart of Gold.

Okay? So it's a very, very common technique, but there is a little bit of a nuance to it. So what I teach to do when they're finding this, and this could take a week or two for you to really find that sweet spot on the guitar, is I tell people, start with your palm. And we're going to put it in front of the sound tone. Now this is really overdoing it, you know. But when you're up here.

There'S not really a lot of sound that comes out of the guitar. The strings are dead. So what you're going to do is you're going to slowly take this chunky part of your palm and we're going to slide it down towards the bridge. All right, now what you're listening for is for the guitar to start opening up. All right, so let's start. I'm going to start right here, just in front of the sound hole. I don't know if you can hear that. I'm not getting much out of the strings. Going to slowly move it back. Okay. So kind of. I'm just behind the sound hole now, and you can hear it starting to kind of chunk up a little bit. So we're going to keep going.

Okay. I don't know if you can hear. Getting chunkier, chunkier.

And there it is. So you're going to hear the guitar open up. So it sounds like the guitar is resonating, but it's not dead. So up here, it's very dead. Back here, you can hear the chunkiness on the guitar. And if you can see on my close up, I'm just in front of this bridge. As I come back.

Watch my hand. Hear it open up. Let's do that again.

Right there. Now, if you go too far, the strings are just going to start to ring again. So let me do that again. Let's go to our close up here. And we've got nothing. Nothing. Little bit of chunk coming in.

Okay. And that's it. You're going to hear it really open up.

Put a chord behind it, like an E minor chord. It sounds really cool. So I always think of a lot of rock songs do this, but there's a lot of acoustic songs that do this as well. So if you need to pause the video to practice that, go right ahead. Like I tell my students, it is something that might take a week or two for you to get. And the key is don't focus on strumming the entire guitar. When I was playing that E minor chord, I was really focusing on the bottom three or four strings. Okay. Because you get. It has a much darker sound to it. And it's all down picks. Okay. That's what I was playing, all down picks. And the rhythm is 1 and 2.

And 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

Okay. So might be a rhythm that you are familiar with. Maybe, maybe not. But it's a very simple and common strumming pattern that a lot of students know. So now that we've talked about finding our palm muting, let's talk about how we can apply this into strumming patterns and into songs. So you saw in that first example, I just used a straight eighth note pattern. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. And I played an E minor chord.

Okay. And then I played D and E minor, which made it sound a lot like Heart of Gold. So usually the first thing I practice with students to get the hang of this is a simple accented rhythm. And what does that mean? So an accent is when we play something louder than the rest of the stuff we're playing. Okay. It looks like a little carrot. And what we're going to do is we are going to accent the first rhythm. To do that, we are going to be releasing the palm muting. So the guitar rings out and then we're going to be bringing it back for the rest of the strum. So basically on the first beat one, we're going to let the guitar ring open.

And then.

We'Re going to come right back to palm muting. So it's going to sound like this. And then we'll practice this together. Right. Just so you can get the hang of adding and subtracting sound to your strumming. So it's going to be 1 and.

2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4M.

11 and 2 and 3 and 4m.

Now if you watch my hand on the close up, you're going to see I'm just flicking my hand away from the guitar. Watch again right here. Ready?

So you can see my hand is just coming off the strings lightly. And then I'm bringing it right back to that sweet spot. And for some students, that's why I teach this one first. It's a hard thing to do because you're still kind of learning where the sweet spot is on your guitar. But by doing this, you're kind of creating a relaxation in your strumming hand too.

Okay. So you're getting used to being flexible with your strumming because most people when we strum, we tend to tense up that strumming hand. So keep it relaxed, keep it loose, and count it in your head.

One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four. And one and two and three and.

Four dot and the next drummy pattern I'm going to show you, we're just going to accent two and four. Okay. So kind of has the feel of a snare drum on a, you know, in a drum set, because they usually accent the two and the four. And what we're going to do, we're going to start by muting. And again, I'm just playing an E minor chord over here with my frettingham.

And it's going to be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

And so we're lifting the hand on 2 and 4. All right, so it's going to sound.

Like this 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. 1 and 2.

Okay, let's pick up the speed just a little bit.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4. M.

Okay, so you can hear how we're going in and out of the guitar ringing through. And we're muting it with our hand to soften. It creates a really cool dynamic. And if you have an electric guitar with an amp, you can run this through an amp, put some distortion on. It sounds really, really great. So I'm going to show you a very, very common rock pattern. All right? I think of songs like summer of 69, Bryan Adams. I think of Guns N Roses, Sweet Child of Mine. You'll hear this a lot in rock songs. And this is what we call a syncopated rhythm. Okay. Syncopated rhythm is when our accents are not on the downbeat. All right? Something happens rhythmically on the upbeat. Now, we don't have any up strums in this strumming pattern. So that's going to be the ands. All right, so not the one, not the two, not the three, not the four. It's going to be the ands. Now, this strumming pattern, we're going to accent one, we're going to accent the and after two and the four.

So it's going to be one and two and three and four.

Okay, so we're going to have, like. We're going to feel like we're almost rushing into the two. So if I take it slow, it's.

Going to be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. Okay, so 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

And now sometimes people have trouble with this, and I say, well, let's clap it out. Okay, so we've got 1 and 2.

And 3 and 4. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

So that's kind of the rhythm.

Okay, so that's 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

Okay. So sometimes if you have trouble with these syncopated rhythms, it's good to just put your pick down, take your hands off the guitar. Especially if you have a guitar strap, it's not going to go anywhere. Take your hand away from the guitar and just clap out the rhythm to get a feel for it.

So that's 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

Now you've got a Feel for it. Now let's put it back on the guitar, and we'll go a little bit slow.

So it'll be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3.

Okay, let's pick up the speed just a little bit. All right, so we got 1, 2.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And.

So, as you can see, it's a very cool strumming pattern, especially when you kind of play it faster and get it up to speed a bit more. Now that you've heard it, you might start hearing it in music. All right. Sometimes we hear things in music and we don't know what we're doing until you learn it on the guitar. And then you're like, oh, I know exactly what they're doing. It's a very, very common pattern in rock music. Be on the lookout. Listen for it. And now you know how to do it. Now sometimes, you know, especially if you're more of like acoustic songwriter, strummy. Strummy kind of person like me, you might not just want to mute the entire chord or just play accented rhythms. So something that's very, very common is to just mute the bass notes. Okay. So if I'm going to switch over to a G chord, I'm going to play a little chord progression, G, E minor, C, D. And you could do something like this.

Kind of get like this little chunky dun dun. Okay. On the bass notes. And what am I doing here? The rhythm I'm playing is 1 and 2 and a 3 and 4 and.

A 1 and 2 and a 3.

And four and a two. So without the palm muting, it is down, down, down, down, up. And then the next chord.

Down, down, down, down, up, down, down, down, down, up.

And then down, down, down, down, up. And what I'm doing is I'm just kind of bouncing my palm on these bass strings. Okay. And again, I'm not strumming the entire chord. Just kind of maybe getting the top two strings on the chord.

Okay. I might sometimes get an extra string, but I'm really just going for a chunkiness on that one. And.

Okay. And you can see I'm strumming into the guitar. So I'm not leaving my palm here. I'm not going because now it's kind of a little stiff for strumming. So I'm actually got the hand moving as if I'm going to strum the guitar. So I'm kind of palm muting down into the guitar. And then I'M doing my regular strums. So it's.

And then down, down, up.

Now, if we put it to a chord progression and be 1 and 2 and a 3 and 4 and a.

1 and 2 and a and 4.

It's very common. You'll hear this a lot. Kind of like country singer songwriter.

If you really enjoyed this lesson and are looking to expand upon your strumming skills and make them even more exciting, go watch this video over here where I'm going to show you how you can take one strumming pattern and turn it into multiple different rhythms. Go watch that video right over there.