Palm mute
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The palm mute, also known as palm muting, is a playing technique for the guitar or bass guitar. Palm mutes are executed by resting the edge of the picking hand's palm on the strings near the bridge, producing a dampened sound. The name is a slight misnomer, as muting is performed by the heel of the hand in general.
While seldom, if ever, encountered in classical music featuring the guitar, palm muting is now a standard technique among electric guitarists who play with a pick. Palm muting is so widely used as to be idiomatic in hard rock, heavy metal, and particularly thrash, speed and death metal, but it is often found in any style of music that features electric guitars with distortion in the signal's pre-amplification stage. It is responsible for the stereotypical "chugging" sound of distorted guitar music.
Palm-muting is also used by bassists in order to obtain warm, "thumpy" tone that is sometimes similar to that of a double bass. The strings may be plucked with the thumb, or with a pick which gives a more percussive tone.
Aspects of performance
There are myriads of way to play with palm muting, but generally the following aspects 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 same 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 farther from the bridge and closer to the bridge changes 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, because
- * it's generally not really 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;
- * while playing intensively, hands usually become sweaty; sweat coming in contact with metal bridge hastens its corrosion; metal strings corrode too, but it's inevitable and strings are considered a consumable, while bridge is relatively more expensive.
- * 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.
Notation
In guitar tablature, palm mutes are rendered with a "P.M." or "PM", and a dashed or dotted line for the duration of the phrase to be muted. If the pitches of the muted notes are discernible, the fret numbers are given accordingly, otherwise they are represented with an X in lieu of a tab number. (If an X appears in lieu of a tab number but there is no P.M. directive, this usually means to mute the string using the fretting hand, not the picking hand.)
P.M.------------| e |------------------| B |--8-------8-------| G |--7-------7-------| D |--6-------6-------| A |--7-------7-------| E |----0-0-0---0-0-0-|
Recorded examples of palm muting
One popular song with palm muting is "Basket Case" by Green Day, where power chords are accented then muted to create a sense of energy and urgency
> PM--------| > PM-| < PM--| > PM-| < PM- > PM> PM-| < PM--| < e |-----------------|-------------------|-----------------|-------------------| B |-----------------|-------------------|-----------------|-------------------| G |-9---------------|-------------------|-----6-----6-----|-------------------| D |-9-9-9-9-9-9-9-9-|-----9-------9-x-x-|-6-6-6-6-6-6---6-|-----6-------6-x-x-| A |-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-9-|-9-9-9-9-9-9-9-x-x-|-4-4-4-4-4-4-6-6-|-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-x-x-| E |---------------7-|-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-x-x-|-------------4-4-|-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-x-x-|Palm muting can also be heard in The Animals' "House of the Rising Sun", and is employed on both acoustic and electric guitars by Al Di Meola. One example of the technique's use on acoustic guitar may be found in Di Meola's "Mediterranean Sundance". Probably the most famous example is The Police's Grammy-award winning Every Breath You Take
More aggressive styles of palm muting grew out of thrash metal in the mid-late 1980s with bands such as Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth moving away from their speed metal roots. The technique was fused with alternate picking to create a percussive grinding effect that is used commonly in extreme forms of heavy metal, sometimes referred to as "scratch guitar".
See also
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