How to Play Heavy Metal With an Acoustic Guitar

Heavy metal is not traditionally played on an acoustic.

You can play heavy metal on an acoustic guitar by playing it as though it is an electric guitar. By lowering your tuning, playing fast and utilizing power chords, your playing will fit in just fine with the heavy metal crowd. Using minor keys and making sure your strings can handle heavy metal picking techniques will assure that you play heavy metal correctly on an instrument not used often in that style of music.

Instructions

1. Replace the stock strings with a heavier gauge set of strings. Heavy metal uses loud volume and a heavy overall song as a way to express a particular feeling in the music. As you will most likely play more aggressively, a thicker set of strings will not only give you a thicker sound, but may hold up better to the double-picking and heavy strumming in heavy metal music.

2. Tune your guitar down a full step from standard tuning. By tuning your lowest string to D and tuning the rest to that string, you can get a thicker, more suitable sound for playing heavy metal. Many bands also drop tune, which is when you lower your lowest string one step below standard tuning. If you tune your guitar to standard D and then lower only the lowest string to C, you would be drop tuning.

3. Play in minor keys. Many heavy metal bands are looking to sound more menacing and more "evil," so they use minor keys to portray this feeling. Minor keys were considered devil music many hundreds of years ago when used to compose classical music, so that has carried over to heavy metal and is used by most of the traditional heavy metal bands for this reason alone.

4. Pick very fast and play as you would on an electric. Although you are using an acoustic guitar, if you play it as though it were electric and palm mute and double pick, you will still sound as though you were playing heavy metal. Palm muting is when you rest the palm of your picking hand on the strings as you play. This mutes the strings and creates a heavier, more chocked sound. Double picking is picking fast notes in an up-and-down manner with your picking hand, which allows you to play faster and more accurately.

5. Use power chords for the rhythm parts on an acoustic guitar. Power chords are the building block of heavy metal rhythm guitar. Many acoustic guitar players prefer open chords that ring out beautifully. As heavy metal is dark and considered dirty, using power chords will make your acoustic guitar sound more metal overall. The power chord is composed of a root note, the fifth above it and the octave of the root.

References

• Olav Torvund's Guitar Site: Lesson 20 - Heavy Metal Guitar, Lesson I: The Basics