Beginner Guitar Lesson 37 - Muted Picking

Have those blisters hardened into calluses yet? If so, congratulations! You must be practicing frequently as you should be. If not, don’t fret, the day will come! (Just remember, the more you practice the sooner that day will arrive).

Today we're going to look at a method employed by many pro guitarists called muted picking. One of the most famous examples of muted picking is in a song called "Every Breath You Take," by the Police. The guitarist from the Police, Andy Summers, employed this technique for the guitar riff that is played in the verse. I think you’ll agree, it sounds really cool!

Andy Summers would play this riff using barred chord voicings, and if you search for the original tablature, you’ll soon see that it is a real stretch for the fretting hand!

Anyway, don’t worry about that stretch, because we have taken this riff and modified the chord voicings a little so that you can play it all in the first position of the neck. But before we actually move onto playing all the chords, I first want you to concentrate on your picking hand.

Muted picking means that you have to deaden the strings with the side of your palm while picking the notes. It gives you those lovely short percussive sounding tones just like you hear in the above example.

To achieve this sound, I first want you to place the side of your palm on your picking hand just before the bridge of your guitar. You should rest it there lightly, which will mute the strings, making the short, muffled or muted sound.  

The picking motion involved in this technique is a bit different than normal alternating down and up picking. This time you are only going to pick downwards, but rather than just picking with the plectrum, it is more likely you will strike the string with the pick to get that hard percussive tone. There is more wrist action involved in this kind of playing. 

Now I want you to set your metronome to 100 bpm and pluck through all the strings E A D G B e as above, one string per beat. Gradually increase speed by 10 bpm every few minutes.

See instructional video (camtasia goes here)

Keep practicing this until you achieve a clean sound on each string and can play it accurately at 200 bpm!  That may sound fast to you, but believe me, it is not that hard and it will really improve your timing too! All you need to do it go at it for 15 minutes every day, and within a week (or even a few days), you'll be ready to move on to the next challenge, which is picking through chords.