Aspects of Performance
There are many ways to perform palm muting, but, generally the following are recognized:
- Applied pressure. Amount of applied pressure tends to vary the sound a lot. Slight touch makes light muting, thus producing more pronounced, fuller sounds. Pressing the hand down intensively makes heavy muting, enhancing staccato effect, adding percussion and making notes less recognizable. Certainly, with some amplification gain, heavily muted notes sound quieter than lightly muted, but given a fair amount of compression, loudness levels become the same and heavily muted notes sound less muddy, with fewer overtones and tonal characteristics than lightly muted.
- Hand position. The most common way to play with palm muting is placing the edge of picking hand near the bridge, dampening the strings when necessary. However, moving the hand further from the bridge and closer to the neck changes the effect drastically. Moving the hand closer to the bridge (and even resting part of edge on the bridge) makes palm muting lighter. Moving the hand farther from bridge (going up to the neck) makes palm muting heavier. Note that resting the palm on the bridge is usually considered a bad practice among guitarists (other than for performing palm muting) for the following reasons:
- Ergonomic: it is generally not very ergonomic to play this way; maintaining the picking hand edge always strictly parallel to the bridge rivets the motions and encumbers performance of most advanced techniques;
- Metal part corrosion: while playing intensively, hands usually become sweaty; sweat coming in contact with metal bridge hastens its corrosion; metal strings corrode too, but strings are considered a consumable, while the bridge is more expensive.
- Tremolo interference: when using floating tremolo bridge, such as Floyd Rose, applying pressure to the bridge may affect the pitch of played strings.
- Amount of amplification (gain).
- Muted notes / chords. Generally, it is recognized that full chords (with 3') sound muddy with large amounts of amplification and distortion, unlike single notes and power chords. Sustain sound coming from each string simultaneously makes large amounts of overlapping overtones after distortion and thus a chord loses its clarity. Palm muting of such chords helps to alleviate this problem, giving notes chuggier, more distortion-friendly sound.
Palm muting is a basis for many other techniques, especially those specific to electric guitars, such as sweep picking or alternate picking.
Read more about this topic: Palm Mute
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