Clean Playing
- Clean playing techniques help you coordinate your right and left hand to reduce extraneous sounds as much as possible. It is a fundamental technique that all guitar players must master.
- Lifting your left hand fingers from a fretted note will mostly deaden the note.
- Metal is all about extremes. Your guitar should be either roaring loud or completely silent. Using these techniques will allow you to quiet those extraneous sounds.
- You can use a noise gate to help reduce those sounds, but you still need to learn these techniques.
- These techniques should be totally second nature. If you try to do these things consciously, your playing will sound worse. It should be instinctive.
- Mute with your left hand as close to the nut as possible to reduce natural harmonics.
- Use your right hand to palm mute or completely deaden the strings when using the left hand muting techniques at the same time.
- Underneath muting is when you use your left hand fingers to mute strings that aren’t being played. Even though you aren’t playing those strings, you should still mute them as an “insurance policy” in case you accidentally hit them.
- Use the tips of your left hand fingers to mute lower strings that aren’t being played. You can use this technique when playing rhythm or lead.
- Only pick notes that should be sounded, but mute other strings anyway just in case. You can anchor your right hand pinky on a string or on your bridge or pickup, but I don’t recommend it.
- You can also use your thumb to wrap over the fretboard to mute the low string if necessary, but this technique is limited in it’s usefulness.
nice lesson bro..the problem i have is when i play a scale faster(not super faster), i get extra noise from the previous note…how can i stop that? what exercises can i do?