As your playing improves over time, at some point you will want to turn your focus from simply playing the notes to playing them with impact, authority, and enhanced dynamic control. Dynamics will enhance everything you play, and for them to work, you must have total control of everything that comes out of your guitar- intended and unintended. Time to Banish Your Unwanted String Noise!
Essential String Muting Techniques
Practice incorporating fretting hand muting into everything you play, even on passages where you rarely encounter noise while playing. Solid left-hand muting will give you the freedom to over-emphasize certain notes to make them sound more confident and authoritative and increase your dynamic range. It may feel awkward at first, but as you take more notice of muting on your left hand, you will find the most effective muting style for each phrase you play, and quickly they will become automatic. In our next article, Banish Your Unwanted String Noise, Part 2, we will explore several useful techniques for muting with the picking hand. What other kinds of string muting have you discovered? Let us know in the comment section below.
…and you’ll be lots happier if you don’t use the spray stuff. Your fretboard and strings will be so clean. You’ll be king (or queen) of clean.
I use all these left hand muting techniques on guitar and bass.
Whenever I see younger players (I’ve been playing 50 years) with a scrunchie wrapped around the nut I know they never learned how to mute strings with their fretting hand.
I had to show the bass player in my band about lifting the fretting finger to make the note more staccato. I guess people never learned these techniques.
I also do some muting with my picking hand. But not for regular playing.
don’t forget, you have 5 fingers on your right hand, and they ALL can mute unwanted strings… most of us guys who’ve been playing for 50 years or so tend to use our fingers a lot for muting, particularly when playing slide. you don’t have to just do palm mutes.
your tone IS in your fingers, so don’t be afraid to use them. yeah, picks are good, they make it easier to play fast, but they don’t have the dynamics of feel of fingers, and trust, ya can play JUST AS FAST with fingers and CLEANER. you can palm the pic.
this is also essential in live situations, and can keep your band from killing you on break; its MUCH easier to play dynamically… you know, not drowning out the rest of the band, particularly the singer… when comping rhythm, which is what you’re gonna be doing most of the time. you can TURN YOUR GUITAR DOWN and play with DYNAMICS. play soft, and be amazed how you can come or go in the mix as you please.
way back in my classical music days playing cello and bass viol, we were taught that if we can hear ourselves in the mix, we were too loud. you should be able to be dynamic enough where if you stop playing, its noticeable, but when you start, its not overpowering everything else.
the correct volume, other than soloing, is where you can’t really hear yourself but can tell when ya drop out. and way easier to do with fingers generally.
ya got 5 fingers and six strings, so you can almost always mute unplayed stuff and crank on that unmuted string. after a while, it becomes second nature to mute out all the baloney.
cool article. peace out.
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If you’re a guitar player, you drag around an amp and cabinet. That’s just how it goes, right? Well, what would happen if your cabinet fell off a building or failed to get packed? Or, what if you simply got tired of lugging the heavy thing around? Could you still play gigs?
Unless you’ve decided to try gigging with only a direct box and some pedals, you’re going to end up miking up a cabinet both on stage and in the studio. Of course, if you’re doing big gigs, the sound team will take care of it, and similarly in the studio, you may not have to think about it.
mark robinson
April 16, 2020
victor wooten uses hair scrunchie and hes one of the best bassist ever