Hey, how are you doing? Justin back with you. Today we're
going to talk about deliberately muting strings. Now, at this point we've
talked a bit about muting strings when we've been playing chords like a C chord
using your third finger to mute the thickest string. And you probably
discovered it doesn't take much of a touch to mute a string. Now, when
you get into playing scales, if you don't do any string muting, many of
the open strings will ring out when you don't really want them to. So I'm
going to talk a little bit about the different approaches to have
the strings get muted which we're going to start by looking at the
picking hand and exactly what that entails. Before we get too much
into the details, I figure I should give a bit of a demonstration so you
can hear exactly what it is what it sounds like when you don't do
string muting and then you do. Because it's very different.
So here's the Emin pentatonic scale with no muting from either hand.
Here we go.
You hear there is a lot of strings ringing out there. If I stop it.
It's a lot of sound that was going on. Now I'll do it with some string muting,
probably better than you will achieve in your first few attempts. I have been
doing this for a little while. If you really what it sound like, go check
out my left handed practice session. Ha Ha it's not working quite as well.
But something like it. Here it goes with no string--with plenty of string muting.
Hear it. There's no sound.
One more time with no string muting.
You want simgle lines to be single lines most of the time. Sometimes you don't...
Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, you've got chord tones ringing out while
you play the single lines then you wouldn't be using string muting.
But if you're playing scales, most of the time you do want to mute strings.
Now the're some danger here which is if you think about it too much and
you get too into it at this stage, it might just screw everything up
for you and you get too obsessed with this as an idea. It's something
that's going to develop with your playing and I feel like the earlier
you're aware of it, the earlier you can start to make some progress
in fixing it. But you should not expect yourself to be doing this
stuff perfectly before you move on. Right? This is likely to take you many
weeks or months...months probably to be able to get this stuff sorted
out. So don't feel like you need to get all of your string muting sorted before
you move on to the next lesson. You definitely don't.
This is a longer term project and I want to explain just a little bit about
how it's gonna work. I will start by looking at the fretting
hand so that you understand how the picking hand is going to pickup the bits
that the fretting hand can't deal with. So the first thing that's a little bit
different with all of the chords and things that we've been looking at
we nearly always want to use the tips of our fingers. But when go on playing
single lines, we want our fingers to be a little bit flatter so they mute
the strings that we're not playing. Play the first note.
Probably there is not too much ringing out unless you've done something
a bit drastic and played more strings than you should.
When the third finger goes down, it is straight away going to be laying
down lightly and muting all of the other strings. I can strum all of
them... and it's just that one note ringing out.
It's not that we aim to use the tips of the fingers. There are circumstances
that where we might want to do that. But I want you to have a go right now
using more of the flat of the third finger so that's it's muting all of
the strings as you go down.
The open fifth string hopefully everything is still muted from that
third finger. So you shouldn't have too many problems here unless
again, you picked too many strings or something like that.
Now, when second finger goes down,
it's still flat and muting all of the other strings but it's also...
the tip of the second finger is muting the thickest string.
So it's muting the thickest string and all of the strings, actually
there's one ringing out there,
but most of the strings underneath it.
The open fourth string, again, there's-- if we just play that and everything
is quiet and being touched, there shouldn't be too much going on here.
Second finger, again, should be, it wasn't there, it should be muting the
fifth string and the notes underneath again. But now, these strings are
kind of open. There's nothing touching that one and this is where the picking
hand starts to get involved by leaning and touching some of the strings.
We're going do a close-up on that hand in just a second. So we have
the open, it goes down muting the fourth string and the strings underneath.
OK? Now this is particularly important when we're coming down...
here when that finger goes down, because we have these open strings,
when this finger goes down, it's also muting the thinnest string.
There's the open string, as it's going down to play that note, it's muting
the thinnest string.
It's now going...if I move the muting,
you get all of the notes ringing out together. Then we lift that
finger off, we play the open string, when second finger goes down here,
on the second fret of the third string, it's muting the second string.
So we've only got one note at a time.
Because the underneath of the second finger is muting that string.
Open, same thing again. Underneath the second finger is muting the third string.
Again, it's now muting all of them. and the thickest string at the same time.
Open, muting, open. So the fretting hand
is doing a lot of the muting job, but not all.
Now let's take a look at whats happening with the picking hand.
So we play that first note. Second note comes in thats mostly the job of the
third finger to do the muting, another down stroke, now, already you
probably can't see it but the heel of my hand is just lightly touching
there on the thickest string.
As aoon as I have moved on to that, that's happening. Just ever so slightly
touching on the thickest string there. So it's not this big motion anymore.
Now there are lots of different picking techniques. This is one of them. OK?
There are some guys that play with a round wrist like this and play very
fast and very accurateley and well and do--leav all the muting to the other hand.
I would recommend you start by just exploring the idea of the hand resting
on the strings there.
So as soon as you're on to that second string, at that point when you're
playing that, there's a litlle bit of touch there. The palm of the hand
is just lighly touching on that string.
Now as you go down, now the palm, it's kind of this part of my palm here
in the crux here the very edge of my palm is just ever so lighly resting
on the strings as I go down.
So now, at this point, it's actually pressing down on all of the strings
there and keeping all of them covered. So, when i'm playing that, actually all
of these strings are muted except for the one that I want to do.
Now that's the basic idea. It is going to be difficult for you to do this.
So don't get too hung up on making this perfect before you move on.