Muted hard rock rhythm is all about using just the right amount of distortion and then muting the strings to create a tight sound with heavy low-end and less ringing overtones. Combined with bass and drums, muted rhythms are a great way to produce an amazingly heavy sound.
Check out these free guitar lessons from Angus Clark’s Take 5: Muted Rock Rhythm, which is an accelerated curriculum designed to help get your muted rhythms technique up to snuff quickly without having to struggle through a lot of tedious exercises.
Muted Rock Rhythm – Overview
This is the mixed bag of stuff at an aggressive tempo. Let’s do it!
Muted Rock Rhythm – Performance
Download the tab, notation and jam track for this hard rock guitar lesson on TrueFire.
There are two sections to this piece:
- A “Spotlight Kid” inspired section where inverted power chords (4ths) are played as stabs between sixteenth-note pedals on the 6h string. In this section, all of the stabs are played as up-strokes and the pedals are played as downstrokes.
- A nu-metal inspired syncopated section that is intercut with some double-time alternate picking sections.
Muted Rock Rhythm – Breakdown
There’s a lot going on in this example, but it’s meant to open the door for you to explore beyond this course and to show you how diverse and varied things can get when you are coming up with parts that employ muted rhythms.
One of the most useful techniques I address here is how I let the notes on the 4th and 5th strings ring while I mute the 6th string. This is a whole lesson unto itself.
Take each section in turn and slow this down if you have to. The course progresses from example to example so if you haven’t really mastered some of the stuff from the earlier lessons you may need to hone your chops a bit before the double time picking comes together at the tempo in this piece.
Dig these free guitar lessons? Check out the full course, Take 5: Muted Rock Rhythm, for more including tab, notation, and jam tracks!