Metal guitar lessons can cover a very large spectrum. There are so many sub genres of metal now that to just say you want metal guitar lessons does not narrow it down enough. The following are examples of sub genres and what the lessons could consist of.
*Traditional metal guitar lessons: Traditional Metal is the early metal from the 70’s and 80’s. Starting back with bands like Black Sabbath in the 70’s to bands like Motley Crue in the 80’s. These kinds of metal guitar lessons would be taken on 6 string electric guitar with humbucking pickups, with or without a Floyd Rose tremolo.
The earlier style traditional metal guitar lessons would cover playing power chords, palm muting, and using minor pentatonic scales. This style is primarily played through an overdriven amplifier.
The Later style traditional metal guitar lessons would cover playing power chords, palm muting, and using minor pentatonic scales too, but would also cover playing 7 tone scales (major scales) and using the Floyd Rose tremolo. Could also cover using techniques like alternate and sweep picking, which would require covering arpeggios also. These techniques starting becoming popular in the late 80’s with the Neo Classical Guitar movement.
*Grunge metal guitar lessons: In the 90’s metal took a different turn with the Grunge movement that came out of Seattle. Bands like Nirvana and Sound Garden turned the metal seen upside down. The double humbucker/Floyd Rose equipped guitars were replaced with simpler guitars like SG’s and Jazzmasters with single coil pickups. Metal guitar lessons of this style could consist of power chords, minor pentatonic scales, and learning to play in “Drop D”. Drop D is when the 6th string is tuned down a whole step, this was a big part of this styles sound.
*NU Metal guitar lessons: In the early 2000’s brought another big change for metal. The traditional 6 string guitar was replaced with the 7 and 8 string guitar, and super low tunings. Metal guitar lessons on this style could consist of learning in a lower tuning, usually one or two steps lower and the addition of one or two extra strings. Learning power chords, minor pentatonic scales, major scales, and very heavy palm muting would be standard.
*Post hardcore, screamo, and death metal guitar lessons: From the early 2000’s to present has brought yet another area of metal guitar lessons. These styles share a lot of the same things as NU Metal, but with some traditional metal mixed in with it. These type of metal guitar lessons could cover many things; power chords, minor pentatonic scales, the 7 major modes (7 positions of the major scale), arpeggios, as well as traditional open chords. These metal guitar lessons would cover techniques like palm muting, alternate picking, sweep picking, raking, and very fast articulate percussive rhythms, often in odd timing.
A good teacher could cover many of these styles of metal guitar lessons if someone was so inclined to want to learn them all.
