If you want a fun way to Suddenly Improve Your Technique then check out this free Metallica riff lesson from Guitar Control instructor Darrin Goodman. This lesson will help you to improve your alternate picking and palm muting techniques. Be sure to click the link for the free tabs that go along with this lesson.
Introduction
Hey everybody how’s it going? This is Darrin with GuitarControl.com bringing you this video lesson. Today I want to show you another riff that is a really good exercise for alternate picking and synchronizing your hands. So we’ve done we’ve done a few of these lately and if you’ve missed out on any of the previous lessons I’ve done on this subject with cool recognizable fun riffs that are good exercises I’ll leave a link for those here so you can check those out. Anyhow today what we’re going to be looking at is it’s a part from Master of Puppets by Metallica and this Metallica riff is not really diatonic, it’s got some chromatic passages. As a general rule I’m not really a big fan of that kind of thing, but it really works well for this and like I said this is just a great exercise. So be sure to click on the link in the description for the tabs and let’s get close up and take a look at this Suddenly Improve Your Technique-Metallica Riff lesson.
Metallica Riff
All right so we start off this Suddenly Improve Your Technique-Metallica Riff lesson with the open low E to the first fret and then to the second fret of the A string… then we repeat that, but what’s going to change is it’s always going to be the open E and the first fret, but the note on the A string moves; so the first time it’s the second fret and the next time it’s the third fret and the next time it’s the fourth fret and then back to the third fret… Then back to the second fret and we do that second fret twice… all right so that’s half of the sequence. So after you do that then it starts over again and then the second time instead of playing that note twice at the end you just play it once; so the whole sequence… and then it just starts over again.
Palm Muting
So with this Metallica riff I am palm muting, you want that muted sound, so it’s kind of punchier, kind of more staccato. So as far as my picking hand with this I am palm muting so I’m just taking this part of my hand and just kind of resting it right here on the bridge right where the strings make contact. So if you’re if you don’t know how to do palm muting, you just got to find that sweet spot, if you’re too far back… if you’re too far forward its dead. You want it that when you hit it that, the note still slightly rings out, it’s not really muted, it’s dampened, they call it palm muting, but it’s really not muted, it’s just dampened.
Alternate Picking
So with this Metallica riff I’m straight up alternate picking, so I’m down up down up down up down…
So when you’re playing a riff like this one of the things that can happen, and this is just kind of separate from the technique, just make it so it just sounds nice and tight when you’re playing; you don’t want to hear those other strings make any noise. So if I move up here and I’m completely not protecting these strings, you can hear a little bit of residual sound, so what I do is you can see that my first finger here has got this kind of an arc, so it’s just lying down and muting the rest of the strings.
Conclusion
All right so there you have it, Suddenly Improve Your Technique-Metallica Riff lesson. Like I said it’s a cool and recognizable riff, but it’s a really good exercise just for working on developing up your alternate picking and your muting and timing too. I mean it’s just got lots of stuff in it so it’s a really good riff for general practice. Anyway if you like the lesson and you got something out of it give me a thumbs up. Leave a comment down below if there’s something you’d like to see covered in a future lesson by myself or one of the other instructors at GuitarControl.com. If you have not already done so, please subscribe to the channel and click that notification bell so that way you don’t miss out on any of the content that we upload throughout the week. So that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks for watching Suddenly Improve Your Technique-Metallica Riff lesson and have a great day.
