Electric guitar playing Tips

This week's article is all about cleaning up your guitar playing. I have 14 top tips to help you clean up your guitar playing and the sounds you produce. Overall, we are going see two different approaches in play. The first is making sure that all the notes/sounds we don't want, cannot be heard, and the second is making sure that the notes we do want are very strong and clean.

1. Left Hand Muting

The goal here is to use mostly your first finger to do a lot of the grunt with the muting. There are two simultaneous muting devices going on with one finger here: the very tip of your first finger is going to always gently touch the string above it, as you move up to a different string or a different note then always maintain that the tip of your first finger is touching and muting the string above. At the same time, while fretting your target note, the fleshy part of your first finger should be gently resting against all the strings underneath your target note.

To use an example and to combine the two: if you are playing a note on the 5th fret of the D string with your first finger, the tip of your first finger should just be touching and muting the A string while the underside of your first finger will be gently touching and muting the G, B and high E strings. Again, test this by strumming from the A to high E string and with a bit of luck, you'll only be able to hear the one note. Now, obviously this should only be used when there are not any notes on the surrounding strings that you want to sound. You probably don't want to be using this approach on open chords for example.

Also it's worth mentioning that you can mute with the tip of your other fingers although it's generally not quite as easy, and you may find yourself fretting with your third finger and still muting underneath with your first finger if it not being used elsewhere. As a cheeky little side tip, if your hands allow it you can also wrap you thumb over the top of the neck to mute the low E string (and the A and D string too if you are Paul Gilbert).

2. Solid String Contact

This is something that's easier to fix at the start of your playing but it's fixable later on if you focus on it. The tip/trick here is to make sure you are pressing hard enough the give the string strong and consistent contact with the fret wire. At the same time try to get each finger placed just to the left of each fret wire (the closer the better) but be sure not to press directly on the fret wire itself. Getting each finger to always fret this way might take a little practice but it's worth it in the long run.

3. Finger Strength

Building finger strength is going to help give you more consistency in your legato lines and ultimately help clean up some of your legato playing. Practice single hammer-ons and pull-offs, trills, and longer legato lines and try to aim for consistency in note volume and overall dynamics. Try to also play the same lick over and over with varying dynamics. This will help to give you more control over the articulation of your legato lines.

4. String Bending

Be careful when bending strings that you don't accidentally snag another string on the way back down. To help ensure that you don't catch other strings, push into the fretboard as you push upwards, this will make sure the other strings pile up on your finger tip rather than get caught underneath your finger.

Another trick is to use your right hand to mute when you bend. To explain, let's say you bend a note up on the B string, just after you pick the B string rest the side of your thumb on the string above (G string) and use a right hand finger such as your middle finger to touch and mute the string below (high E string). This is going to give you absolute confidence that ONLY the string you are intending to play and/or bend is going to sound.

5. Right Hand Muting

Right hand muting can happen two ways as well. Firstly you can rest the fleshy part of your palm on and strings that aren't being played, for example a note on the G string means you can effectively palm mute the , A and D strings. If you pick with an open hand you can also rest any unused fingers on strings high in pitch that the one you are playing on. For example, the previous example of a note on the G string, you can rest some fingers on the B and high E strings for muting.

6. Pick Muting

Pick muting can be used to give staccato elements to your playing. The technique involves picking a note and then immediately bringing the pick back to rest on the other side of the string. So if you pick with a down stroke, then you immediately do an upstroke but instead of picking through on the upstroke you just rest it against the string. Likewise, if you pick with an upstroke you immediately go to do a down stroke and rest on the string (again don't actually pick through on the down stroke, just rest solidly against the string to mute it).

Another way to achieve a similar but slightly different affect is to release the pressure on the notes with your left hand, your fingers will still be touching the string in the same place except for the fact that you will not be pressing the string against the fret wire. This is very common in funk rhythm playing and gives you that super clean choppy rhythm vibe.

7. Inside/Outside Picking

Experiment with both inside and outside picking and see how that effects the sound/feel of your playing. I'll quickly explain the difference. Outside picking is when you are alternate picking two adjacent strings, you down pick the lower string (B for example) and up pick the higher string (high E for example) like this: -> | |

Inside picking would be up picking the B string and down picking the high E string. So you are picking from the inside of the string pair like so: | |