Rock Guitar Riff With Palm Muting

Video Transcript

"Okay, here's a lick that's in the key of A minor. I'm going to use the A minor pentatonic scale and what I'm going to do is use some palm muting. So you're going to hear kind of an aggressive sound as I ascend on this lick. I'm going to play this four times in a row; so let;s see what it sounds like; two, three, four. Okay, let's take a closer look at this lick. What I do to get that aggressive sound is called palm muting. It's where I take the side of my right palm; my picking hand palm and place it on the strings right where they leave the bridge and that gets a more of a, I guess a husky sound, is the best way to put it. If I don't do that, the lick would sound like this. When I stick my hand down; you get a more aggressive sound. If you try to practice this and you find that you're getting too clicky of a sound; meaning you're not really hearing the note; that means you're too close to the pick up sound of the guitar and you want to move your hand back closer to the bridge. If you get too close to the pick ups; what I mean by clicky is, it doesn't even sound like a note. Move your hand right where it comes off and you'll get that, that really hard rock sound. Another thing is this lick uses a position shift about three or four notes in. So you start out in third position, meaning on the third fret. So after those four notes you're going to slide up to the seventh fret and continue on the lick from there. And at the end, what I like to use is a nice, slow, smooth singing vibrato which means that I shake the string back and forth a few times; gives the note a little bit of life at the end. Alright, now I want to play it for you with the backing track two times slowly so you can break it down yourself; three, four."