While seldom, if ever, encountered in Classical Music featuring the guitar, palm muting is now a standard technique among guitar players 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.
There are myriads of way to play with palm muting, but, generally, following aspects are recognized:
- . 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 muddier, with less Overtone s and tonal characteristics than lightly muted.
- . 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 of 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.
Palm muting is a basis for lots of other techniques, especially ones specific to electric guitars, for example, Sweep Picking or Alternate Picking .
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.)
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