Death Metal Guitar Lessons That You Can Understand

Author: Paul Gian

Death metal, as a genre of music evolved in the 80's from thrash metal and quickly gained popularity. This genre of music is characterized by deep, dark vocals and predominant guitar work. The guitar parts are not plain lead tunes like in rock or jazz. Instead these are a combination of powerful notes enhanced further by technical manipulations through distortion and other fingering techniques. For people who get a high out of death metal guitar, there are many death metal guitar lessons available online that would enable step by step learning of the various skills that enable one to play death metal.

The lessons could mostly be divided into two categories. The first set of lessons is primarily aimed at improving the skills of the guitarist. There are a lot of things one can do with the guitar and the playing hand. To start off, there are hammer-ons and pull-offs which involve quick but deft touches of the finger on the strings, producing sudden tones that embellish the main sound.

Palm muting is another technique, where the strings are muted by the palms, resulting in a choked sound in between actual chords, giving the sound a nice variety and breaking away from the monotony of the chords.

Picking the strings, in other words, stroking the strings with the plectrum is also very important. Some lessons would purely focus on tremolo picking and up and down strumming. Playing lot of notes in small time signatures or intervals of time is a characteristic feature of death metal. To be able to play many notes, one must develop the ability to pick the guitar both in the upward and downward movement of the plectrum, doubling the number of notes played at the same time.

The second set of metal guitar lessons is aimed at understanding not only the instrument but also its primary aide, an accessory called distortion box. For a heavy style of metal playing, the guitar is turned down a note to suit the powerful and low pitched vocals. The distortion box helps in sustaining a note for a long time and also introduces overtones comprised of varying sounds.

Death metal is part skill and part technology, leading to a great genre of music that could get the adrenaline pumping. With proper lessons and practice, you will be playing and banging your head along to death metal tunes with your guitar in no time.


Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/death-metal-guitar-lessons-that-you-can-understand-1515332.html