Are you ready to add some spice to your guitar strumming with a mute technique?
Well you're in the right place. Let's do it.
Hi I'm Tomas Michaud from Real Guitar Success where I help you learn guitar
and more importantly to love your guitar learning journey. The mute technique can
be used in many different ways to add spice and interest to your strumming and
other aspects of guitar playing. But today we're going to specifically talk
about using it as part of a strum - the mute strum. Now to be clear there's two
types of muting. A left hand mute where you're actually lifting your fingers off
the string and the right hand mute also sometimes called the palm mute which is
what we're going to be talking about today. So we're gonna stick with the
right hand mute. It's funny to say the palm mute because you're actually gonna
be using the side of your hand as opposed to the front of your palm but in
any case palm mute it is. Let's start off with the basic technique. Take a look at
my right hand. I'm gonna turn my hand to the side and do kind of a karate chop to
the nut or bridge of the guitar. Now that's that part right here on the
guitar. Then move my hand a little bit towards the sound hole and hit the
string so now I'm not touching that bridge anymore. I'm on the strings
themselves. This is about the right place. And I say
about because you can move it and get a little different sound but let's keep it
simple and put it in one place to start. Now what you're gonna do is actually hit
the strings with your palm there. No sound. I'm gonna make a chord so you can
hear a little bit of the chord sound. It's actually making a sound. It's softer then
if I let the chord ring and that's the sound we're after.
First off you might want to experiment with moving your hand around and seeing
how it sounds. You need to make a chord otherwise it'll always sound muted.
It usually sounds more muted as I get closer to the sound hole and of course I
can press harder and make it more muted and press lighter and make it less muted.
Over time you'll develop more control with that. For now
worry more about just getting the basic technique and the strum to go with it so
you can practice it. Now once you've messed around with the
basic technique a little bit and you've experimented I want you to get a feel
for it. You're going to add a little bit of strumming pattern to it. The first
strumming pattern we're going to do is just muting as you strike down and then
unmuting on the way up. This is very similar to what the Beatles using that
song Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. I'm using on the way down and releasing on the way up. It
makes a great exercise and you can always hum along that Beatles song if you feel
so incline, so let's try it. G chord. Try along. Got your guitar, right? Good.
We're gonna mute on the way down and then release on the way up.
No muting. Mute. Release on the way up. If it doesn't sound that great, it should be
expected. You've just learned this. What you want to do is try it over and over
over a period of days even. Great if you get it right away but that would be very
unusual if that's the case. It takes time to kind of work it so strike and then
release strike and then release that is the basic and most useful technique. Now I'm going to
show you how to incorporate that into a little longer strum as well .We're gonna
incorporate to a strum that's two open down up then mute and then up. I call this
acoustic rock strum because it's commonly used in that style. So that what
kind of sounds coming from me palming the strings and picking at the same time.
Down, up. So the basic strum again once you've got this basic technique is
simply down, up, mute and then on the way up and do it twice. Now here's our exercise
to practice with that just two chords. We'll start with the G chord and go to
the C chord twice each chord - down, up, mute, up, down, up
and then C chord and back
to C. So now you're practicing keeping the mute strum going while you're
changing chords. A couple of tips that I think you'll find very helpful. One is
don't worry when you're hitting the strings and the mute strum that you're
hitting all the strings. In fact I prefer to hit mostly just the lower strings as
more variety to the strum. So as I'm hanging the lower strings and
then I'll Up without muting it adds this kind of low high low high to the mute
unmute mute unmute sound. It adds movement to the strum pattern and that's
partly what makes strum pattern sound interesting. They're not always the same
up and down. The second tip is to expect us to take it a little while. Great if it
doesn't but these kinds of things for most students take persistence and just
keep coming back at it. Start with the easier version of it just start by
making the sound and then start with this down up pattern for a while just to
see if you can get the sound maybe for a week or so and then try adding it into
the whole strum down. Down, up, mute, up
Then once you've got that strum working you can try adding it into some of your
other strums. For example I'll do a basic strum like open
and then I'll start muting to add some progression to the song. Starts off open
and then goes to mute and then open up again and that creates more of a
longer-term interest than doing the exact same thing throughout the entire
song. Thank you for joining me. I've enjoyed spending this time with you.
I look forward to seeing you in another video and by the way if you haven't
already please subscribe to my YouTube channel
and click that little bell so you don't miss a thing. Remember learning guitar is a
journey not a destination. Let me know in the comments how I can best help you to
love your guitar learning journey. Bye for now.