Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher

Category: Music

Tags: playmutingnick minnionbarre chordslearnskasecret guitar teacherspanish guitarguitarreggae

Description: In part two of the Art of Muting mini-series, Nick shows how to apply the technique of muting chords specifically to playing barre chords and demonstrates how this improves their sound and enables you to master specific rhythms on the guitar (examples include Spanish and Caribbean styles like Ska and Reggae). Catch up with part one here: youtu.be/4cBWMK1QxAM For full access to the Secret Guitar Teacher materials and courses visit secretguitarteacher.com ! Abridged script: When we first start learning guitar most of us find open chords like G A and D a lot easier to play than barre chords. But we usually work away at improving our barre chords because we can appreciate their versatility – the fact that one chord shape immediately gives you 12 different chords you can play. But as well as this, barre chords have a less immediately obvious advantage over open chords and that is that the fingers of your fretting hand… are in control of the sound of all 6 strings and this makes barre chords much easier to mute than open chords. You can turn the sound on just by a squeeze of the hand and instantly chop the sound off cleanly just by relaxing the pressure and letting the strings come away from the fret. Remember though that although you let the strings come away from the frets – you must still keep your fingers in touch with the string. Take your fingers away from the strings completely and you’ll get a residue of sound like this… that’s unlikely to be the sound you want, at least most of the time. Let’s try this out over a commonly used sequence that I think originates from Spanish guitar you’ll hear this sequence crop up in all kinds of songs. This is what it looks like. If this is the first time you have had a go at muting barre chords I suggest simply starting by experimenting – first just try playing each chord and cutting the sound off cleanly like this. Notice that this isn’t too hard to do with the barre chords - just by relaxing the grip of the fretting hand, but for the open ‘E’ Chord relaxing the fretting hand doesn’t work because the open strings just keep on ringing. For now, you can simply mute this chord by lightly gripping the guitar neck like this. Once you feel you have got this technique under a reasonable level of control then have a go at working the other way round. This means that instead of thinking in terms of cutting off the sound - you start with the muted sound and ‘punch in’ the clean sounds to a particular rhythm like this. First establish a steady underlying rhythmic pattern with your strumming hand while your fretting hands mutes the strings– for example, this can be four to the bar… or 8, 12 or 16 to the bar. Then punch in a rhythmic figure over that underlying pattern like this. If you work on that technique and get good control of it, this opens up not only Spanish style rhythms, but also other basic rhythmic patterns like those behind Caribbean styles like Ska or Reggae.