Fast Palm Muting Rhythm Playing

If you love metal, whether it be death metal, metalcore, power metal, progressive metal, or any variation, you have heard palm mutes.

If you find palm muting easy, but are still baffled by the speeds of which some bands achieve this technique, it’s okay; fast palm muting takes a lot of practice.

Lucky for you, we have a few exercises that can help you speed up the process.

First off, we need to make sure your hand positioning is correct, as this will make speed come to you a lot easier.

The side of your picking hand, when palm muting, should rest just before the bridge. The back of your palm’s side --the section which would be perfectly aligned with your thumb if you stuck it straight up-- should rest gently on the corner of the bridge itself. This not only helps you to achieve the most effective palm muting tone but also allows your wrist to stay relaxed.

Next, the key element to achieving fast palm mutes is hand height. When you lift your hand in between notes if you pull too far from the strings you will slow yourself down and add unnecessary stress to your wrist.

On the contrary, if you don’t lift your palm enough then you will find your notes muddled and dampened by your hand’s interference. When lifting your hand in between palm mutes, lift your hand only a half inch from your strings. This prevents both interference problems and distance problems.

To have fast palm muting you first need to build stamina in your picking hand. Face it; without endurance a runner is little more than a speed walker, and without sufficient stamina your palm mutes will be little more than a garbled mess. Using either a kitchen timer, a watch or a timer on your phone or computer, set a goal time.

The best thing is to start off small, so choose either one or two minutes to avoid injury. Before you start your timer, take a metronome and set it at a comfortable speed. Once you start the timer, start the metronome and begin picking a steady stream of palm muted sixteenth notes. Do not stop until the timer goes off.

If you chose a reasonable time, you should have been able to play a constant flow of sixteenth notes until the buzzer went off. If you couldn’t, then you have work to do, and I suggest you practice the exercise a few times per day. This will help your picking hand attain the base it will need to make fast palm muting possible.

Once you can play for four minutes straight, you are in the home stretch. The final exercise is simple but diabolical. Once again you will want to start off with a short time, as you want to be able to reach your goal.

This time instead of playing a steady stream of palm muted notes, you will play a stream of alternating palm mutes going from palm mute to open, palm mute to open. This is the key exercise that will build up your palm muting to make you a muting rhythm master.

As with all guitar techniques, mastering fast palm mutes will take time. Be patient and work diligently. Results aren’t always noticeable to us, but your friends and jam buddies will definitely notice even the subtlest of improvements.

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