Palm Muting For Beginners: Heavy Tone

It’s safe to say that palm muting is the core technique that made you want to pick up a guitar and start playing metal. It’s that chunky, crunchy, chugging sound.

Palm muting is part of the foundation for playing metal guitar. Especially for rhythms and riffs. Once you get good at palm muting, you open the pathway to learn almost any metal song as well as write your own riffs.

In this post, I’m going to cover the basics of palm muting for metal guitar. There are also some exercises below that you can practice to get better at palm muting. And we’ll cover some advanced steps to quickly go from a beginner to intermediate metal guitarist.

Getting Started with Palm Muting

Palm muting is a right-hand technique (or, rather, a picking hand technique if you’re a lefty). The most important part of this method is the positioning of that hand.

Here are the basics you need to know to get started:

• Rest the outside of your palm over the strings where the strings go into the bridge of your guitar
• Press your palm down firm enough to mute the notes
• Don’t press your palm down too hard as you’ll bend the notes out of tune
• Start by practicing down picking on the open E string (we’re going to cover some exercises and practice tips below)
• Don’t worry about speed at this point but make your notes consistent and focus on clarity

TIP: Try subtly moving your palm around until you get a solid palm mute. You may also find that your hand positioning may be slightly different with different guitars.

So don’t let that throw you off if you pick up another guitar and it’s not the same. Just play around with positioning until you nail it.

Basic Palm Muting Exercises

Let’s play some simple palm muting exercises. You’ll start with open string palm muting. This will help you get the technique down. Then we’ll gradually build on that by adding power chords and single note riffs.

Exercise 1: Open String Palm Muting

This is a simple palm muting exercise going back and forth between the E and A power chords, using the open E and A strings. You’ll play and palm mute both notes of each power chord (open string plus next string, 2nd fret).

Exercise 2: Palm Muting with Power Chords

In this exercise, you’ll palm mute a progression of non-open string power chords. This riff also also involved more overall fretboard movement.

Exercise 3: Palm Muting with Single Note Riffs

Here you’ll integrate palm muting with some single note riffs with even more fretboard movement. You’ll also notice in the tabs below that some single notes are palm muted while others are not. This exercise will get you used to integrating both, which will help you progress faster at riffs.

Metal Tone Settings for Palm Muted Riffs

Before we go further, let’s briefly go over some basic tone settings for metal guitar. As ‘good tone’ is subjective, this is only to serve as a starting point for you. So feel free to adjust the settings as you see fit.

This will work with any high gain amp or high gain amp simulator. We’ll also talk about the cabinet and mic settings.

• Gain: 7 (if you’re using an overdrive pedal – you may want to crank it if you’re not using an OD pedal)
• Bass: 6
• Mids: 4
• Treble: 7
• Presence (when applicable): 6
• It’s also common to place an overdrive pedal in front of the amp with the level all the way up and drive at zero (this helps give you a tighter tone)

The cabinet (speakers) and mic placement are arguably the dominating factor when it comes to tone. To keep things simple, if you’re using an amp simulator, just go with the default cabinet for that amp. The same can be said for a real amp.

If you’re practicing with a real amp, mic placement isn’t going to be part the equation as you’re not recording. If you’re playing with an amp simulator you’re probably going to have many options for both mics and placements.

For the sake of simplicity, you usually can’t go wrong with the SM57 mic. And there’s a sweet spot between the center and edge with the mic placed close to the grill.

Again, this is just a template and starting point. If you don’t like what you’re hearing, make adjustments. Part of being a metal guitar player is finding what tone works best for you and your style.

***The best advice that I can give beginners is to focus more on playing and practicing and less on dialing in tones.

Palm Muting with Alternate Picking

The palm muting exercises you played earlier were all played with down picking, or downstrokes. And that’s a great method to begin with to build a solid foundation for metal guitar rhythms.

But you also want to practice palm muting with alternate picking. I made the mistake of only down picking my first year of playing guitar. It was difficult to start alternate picking at that point.

So I encourage you to practice alternate picking (if you haven’t yet, start now!). You can also combine palm muting with that.

And there’s one tip I want to share when combining these techniques and alternate picking, in general:

When you’re playing downstrokes, you may notice the angle if your pick is going more towards the neck. Not in an extreme direction, but you’re not picking straight up and down.

When you’re alternate picking, you may notice that your pick as a tendency to go more towards the bridge. Again, this isn’t anywhere close to an extreme position. It’s just slightly moving in that direction rather than strictly up and down.

This probably isn’t anything that you’ll have to change. Simply noticing the tendency and knowing that it’s okay may help you progress faster. In other words, you may find that your hands may naturally gravitate in certain directions. For the most part, embrace that.

One more note on alternate picking and palm muting together. You will get more clarity alternate picking a single note that’s palm muted rather than palm muting the two-note power chords. This doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t palm mute the chord but it’s something to be aware of.

***We have more metal guitar exercises combining techniques in this post: Metal Guitar Exercises: Play Faster and Tighter Riffs

Applying Palm Muting to Riffs

The last thing you want to do is learn to palm mute only to chug away on one note. It sounds cool but it’s in your best interest to expand by moving your fingers around more.

We covered that in the 3rd exercise earlier. But don’t stop there. Continue adding more notes to these riffs. Of course, you’ll learn more riffs from songs but I also want you to get creative and add your own notes.

Power chords are also considered riffs. You can add more ad move them around. And you can palm mute those, too. You don’t always have to palm mute the open strings.

As you make progress, you’ll want to start combining all of these techniques – palm muting, power chords, and single note riffs, and both downstrokes and alternate picking.

Don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed. Take it one step at a time.

Palm Muting in Lead Guitar Playing

Palm muting isn’t reserved for rhythm guitar only. You can also incorporate it into leads. This can give your guitar solos more character and make them sound more interesting.

As a beginner, I recommend mastering rhythm playing, first. Some guitarists make the mistake of learning to shred but never get proficient at rhythm playing.

You can have a metal song with a solo but you can’t have one with the rhythm. So keep that in mind (although I do strongly encourage you to learn lead playing, too).

Troubleshooting Common Palm Muting Problems

If you’ve gone through the exercises in this post and the video lessons that we have on the Metal Mastermind YouTube channel but still having trouble, there are some easy steps to solve that problem.

Here are some palm muting common issues and what to do:

• I get string noise when I palm mute: Make small adjustments to the position of your palm as you play this technique
• My notes sound out of key when I palm mute: This is often from pressing your palm on the bridge too hard, which bends the strings so back off a little
• My palm muting sounds muddy: The clarity often comes from your picking technique. Make sure you’re picking the notes in sync with your palm muting. Another issue could be too much gain or you need a noise gate on your amp (or amp sim)
• My timing is off: Practice to a drum track (we’ll get more into that below)

Tips for Practicing Palm Muting

The best way to get better at palm muting is simple. Play metal riffs as often as you can and keep learning new riffs as well as creating your own. That’s the beauty of heavy metal music. It’s filled with palm muting.

There are some additional tips to help you get better, faster:

• Allow yourself to make gradual progress (start slow and build up)

• If you focus too much on speed too soon, your riffs will sound sloppy
• Practice playing along with songs and exercises (like the ones in this post)
• Practice with a drum program or drum machine (this is much more motivating that playing to a click track or metronome)
• Record yourself to monitor progress and identify areas for improvement

Go from Beginner to Intermediate

Once you master palm muting you open up endless paths to learning metal riffs and creating your own. But it doesn’t stop there.

As you get better at techniques like palm muting you want to be able to easily combine it with other techniques. For example, palm muting with single note riffs like as we discussed earlier. Getting good at palm muting with both down picking and alternate picking.

You’ll be diving deeper into metal guitar methods and combining these techniques in our course, Metal Guitar Apprentice. Even better, you’ll be implementing all of this by learning riffs throughout the course, taking you through a natural progression and learning at your own pace.

Click below to learn more.