We’ll now explore a rhythm guitar playing technique that is specifically to do with the right hand or picking hand. As you would’ve noticed by now, your right hand does all the time-related work while the left hand takes care of all the melody and harmony aspects.

Muting, either partial or full muting, allows you to play a chord (which normally has a big and open sound) with a sound that is a lot more subdued in terms of notes and harmonies, but more percussive at the same time. We’ll use a slightly different position to play the G, C and D chords for practising muting – basically we’ll play the barre chord versions of these chords.

Barre Chords for Practising Muting

Muting with Your Right Hand

If you place your right hand lightly on the strings, the sound gets muffled. As you move your right hand from the bridge end of the guitar towards the neck, the sound gets progressively muted and finally deadened. Normally you wouldn’t want to completely mute the sound (unless for added effect), but the partial muting combined with the wide-open sound gives you more dynamics while you play.

Practise this by playing two muted strokes followed by a wide-open sound on every one of the three chords. It gives your rhythm a nice contrast and makes it sound bouncy. All you have to do is place the lower edge of your palm lightly on the strings, close to the bridge, in such a way as to muffle the sound but not deaden it. The position where you place your hand and the amount of pressure you apply are the two variables you control to mute the sound.

Muting allows you to play a more dynamic rhythm which will always come in handy when you’re playing along to different songs. The upcoming blog post continues with muting techniques in guitar, moving on to explore muting using the left hand. Keep reading to learn how to do that.