Beginner Guitar Lesson 38 - 9th Chords and Mute Picking

Hello again, and welcome to our second step in harnessing the skill of mute picking. Now that you have familiarized yourself with the mechanics of the technique, let’s get musical with it!

In the last article, I mentioned that Police guitarist Andy Summers is a bit of a dab hand at mute picking and that he employed this technique in the famous hit "Every Breath You Take." Well, to that end, we are going to learn the chord progression for that song, and apply our muted picking pattern to it.

Now, the thing that is great about this chord progression is that it uses 9th chords. "What chords?" I anticipate you asking.

Well, let me explain; take the extended scale of C major that we learned earlier, and count from the first note all the way up to the 9th note. What note is number 9? Did you get it? Take a look at the diagram below. It illustrates the notes with their respective number names below. We can clearly see that the 9th note of C is D.

C D E F G A B C D  E   F

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8  9 10 11

So, in order to play a C major 9 chord, we must add this note on top of the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes. Play a regular C chord and place your 4th finger of your fretting hand on the 3rd fret of the B string to give you that D (the 9th note of C). This will cancel out what your 1st finger was playing, but that is what we want to do, so don’t sweat it!

You've got it! Now pick through it from the root note to the thin open E string using down-up motions and the muted picking technique.

Well done! Now we have to work on that picking pattern since we’re going to alter it just a little bit. First, pluck the root (3rd fret A string), but skip the D string and pluck the open G string. Then pluck the B string, the G again, and finally the open E string, the B string, the G string and the B string once more.  This pattern is illustrated in notation and TAB below.

 

Remember, you need to practice this technique while voicing the Cmajor9 chord with your fretting hand. It isn't exactly a stroll in the park, so you’ll need to practice this the same way you practiced mute picking in the previous lesson... ardently!

For today, this is enough for you to contend with, so I’ll leave you to prepare for the next lesson when you’ll learn the rest of the chords in "Every Breath You Take."