Ok, I know about palm muting, but I'm curious how would you mute chords like G or D or E if your doing down and up strumming?
Two songs you might be familar with are Stone temple Pilots "Plush", which uses a lot of percussive muting with 1/16th note strumming patterns, and another is Seven Mary Three's "cumbersome".
I don't see how right hand palm muting could be effective for muffling unless it's all downstrokes. How do you handle aggressive strumming patterns and non barred chords while doing the percussive fret hand muting?
John
I tend to use barre chords for what you describe. Depending on the song, you can also simply use the fingers of your fretting hand to mute the strings lightly without fretting a chord. Just lay your fingers lightly across the strings.
Well we all shine on--like the moon and the stars and the sun.
-- John Lennon
Listen to Dave Matthews. He's the master of percussive, muted chord strumming. Even better, get a video and watch how he does it. Especially listen to "Live at Luther College" which is Dave without the band. You can really hear how he maintains the beat with muted strokes. I read once that he learned to do this early on because he always imagined that there was a drum kit playing behind him and, because there wasn't, he needed to play the rythym himself.
I can play a few Dave songs but getting the muted strokes down correctly is very difficult.
Try fingeringering open chords withotu the index finger. Then when you want to mute, remove pressure from whatever frets you're pressing and mildly lay down the index finger over all strings. Remove the index finger and re-fret with the other fingers to continue the chord.
Mr. Kline,
I'd go with what Musen said, either using barre chords or laying a finger down over the strings.
For example. the G chord: Finger the chord, and lie your middle finger (which should be on the bass note) across all the strings, but not with enough pressure to actually sound a note. And then release the pressure on the 3rd fret of E in the same manner. Now all the strings should be 'deadened'.
With open chords like D and E, it'll be harder to do this with ALL the strings in the chord, but you can get the percussive effect by doing it to just the strings that have fingers on them. (EBG for the D Chord, GDA for the E chord)
Or for the E chord, you chould barre all the strings, and then go back to the E chord, but this might be slightly too difficult, especially with 1/16th notes.
Hope that helps,
Taso
