Metal Techniques Guitar

Though heavy metal was the reason why I picked up the guitar in the first place, I couldn’t start playing my favorite genre from the start.

When I listened to heavy metal guitar techniques like fast legato runs or sweep picking being played, I used to believe that it would take me ages before I could even consider playing the genre.

Today I’ll give you a list of techniques that are commonly used in heavy metal music and are within the reach of beginner and intermediate guitar players.

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Though this list of metal guitar techniques is not written in any strict order, I’ve tried to put the techniques that are either easy to learn, and/or are very commonly used, at the top.

Power chords are easy to learn and use since they’re made of just two notes, are moveable across the guitar fretboard, and do not require you to perform a barre.

They’re used regularly in heavy metal guitar riffs, either as a sequence of power chords (ex 1) or combined with other notes or chords (ex 2).

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The riffs in the example above sound rather bland, the reason being that other techniques are usually applied to power chord riffs.

The guitar technique most commonly applied to power chords (among other things), is palm muting, where the palm of your right hand lightly presses the strings close to the bridge.

The following is a power chord riff that makes use of palm muting, which is indicated by the letters P.M.—- below the notes or chords on which the technique is to be applied.

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These silences are called rests. To get them on your guitar you need to either lift your left hand from the strings (but keep it touching the strings so that no unwanted noise comes out) or use your right hand to mute the string completely.

It is executed by bending the strings in a rapid motion where rather than hit the next note with the bend (as we’ll see in the next technique, string bending) you’ll give a different, pleasant sound to the note you’re playing.

String bending and vibrato are two techniques that can literally make the guitar sing since they can imitate the way the human voice produces the notes when singing.

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In this lesson, you’ll find a variety of string bending exercises to get started in this technique commonly found in heavy metal and most guitar-oriented genres of music.

James Hetfield is known for his consecutive downward picking in his riffs. Other guitarists prefer alternate picking while others go for economy or directional picking.

But a great guitar player is able to accent some notes by hitting them with more force than others and play around with the dynamics (the loudness of the notes – piano, forte).

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In this lesson on guitar picking I show you how to train your right hand to gain control of the pick, a skill you’ll be needing a lot if you want to become a metal guitarist.

No matter how melodic, complex, fast or creative the music you’re playing is, if you don’t play it on time, it sucks.

The heavy metal gallop is simply playing one of these two rhythmic patterns in succession, usually over power chords, sometimes with palm muting applied.

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A common technique used in heavy metal guitar riffs is the drone, where one note, sometimes palm-muted, is repeated over a changing melody.

Chords are inverted when the lowest note in the chord is not the root. In music notation, they’re written as slash chords, with the name of the note to be played in the bass written after the slash.

For instance, C/E is made of the notes of the C major chord (C, E, and G) with the note E played in the bass.

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Since power chords are made of just two notes (and this, in theory, makes them a dyad rather than an actual chord) an inverted power chord is one where the fifth note is in the bass.

Inverted power chords work well in combination with power chords in root position as well as single notes when composing guitar riffs.

They are performed by playing rapid pull-offs and hammer-ons between the note you want to ornament and the note a fret or two above it.

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Another guitar technique commonly used in metal music is tremolo picking where the same note is hit rapidly by the pick multiple times, as in the following example:

This technique is more commonly used in Country music (where it’s usually referred to as Chicken Picking) but it has also made inroads in metal music since it gives the player the ability to play wide leaps with ease as well as very fast.

In this lesson I give you a set of hybrid picking exercises that start easy and get harder, ending with a heavy metal guitar riff that uses this technique.

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That being said, if you’ve got a good grasp of the metal guitar techniques in this list that you need to express yourself in this genre (probably most of them), it’s good to start building your speed since heavy metal is a fast and aggressive style of music.

If your main goal in music is to become a heavy metal guitar player, you may eventually want to learn more advanced techniques like sweep picking, tapping, and pinch harmonics.

Before you go for the harder stuff though, it’s important that you don’t just “know” the metal guitar techniques explained above, but are also able to use them in a musical context as well as to integrate them together.

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I also suggest that you learn the basics of music theory as well as mastering the fretboard since this will make the application of any technique on the guitar a lot easier.

You may consider giving a donation, by which you will be helping a songwriter achieve his dreams. Each contribution, no matter how small, will make a difference.Learn how to stop sounding mechanical and start sounding like some of your favorite Metal artists with instruction from Shaun Michaud. In this series of video tutorials, Michaud, course author of the

Course at Berklee , demonstrates several Metal/Progressive Rock techniques that will make your playing faster and more efficient, plus give you a quick how-to for learning quintessential Metal tools like sweep picking and songs like John Petrucci’s solo in “Erotomania.”

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In this first video, Michaud demonstrates a technique he developed after years of dissecting solos from his favorite metal guitar players that breaks down a method of approaching the major scale from the entire fretboard. This method strays away from the traditional approach of the major scale from a smaller window on the guitar that is shown in most beginner books. He starts by pairing the strings into two-string groupings. Each group has the same interval between the strings, thus creating the same shape for each set. Starting from each of the seven notes in the major scale, Michaud plays through the scale patterns up the fretboard, through each string set. He then shows how to use this technique to create musical solos.

Now onward to an Achilles’ heel of guitar players, which is note recognition on the fretboard. Michaud shares an exercise he created that builds note recognition to help with freedom in playing. He starts by looking at the first 12 frets of the guitar and finds only one place to play each note of the scale on each string of the guitar. Using the C Major scale, he finds C on the 6th string, finds D on the 5th string, E on the 4th string, F on the 3rd string, G on the 2nd string, and A on the 1st string. Once he gets to the top string, he reverses direction and continues the scale from where he left off by playing B on the 2nd string etc. This creates what he calls the “neverending” scale.

Combine learning shapes and learning notes on the fretboard, and you will always know where you are. —Shaun Michaud, Author of the Metal Guitar course at @Berklee Click To Tweet

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In this next video, Michaud shows you how to play John Petrucci’s solo in “Erotomania” by Dream Theater. Using hexatonic shapes, he breaks down the solo phrase by phrase, showing you exactly what is going on in Petrucci’s playing. It serves as a perfect real-world example of using lanes and shapes of major scale patterns in a metal guitar style solo.

Now let’s learn Michaud’s approach to pentatonic scales. His method will allow you to learn new ways to divide the notes on the fretboard and create new shapes so that you can play fresh melodic content. Michaud builds upon the lane idea with some familiar sounds of the pentatonic scale.

Michaud moves on to a second way to access the same five notes using the same seven shapes using relative pentatonic shapes, which will allow you to play these notes in a different spot on the guitar neck. This is accomplished by pairing shape one with five, two with six, and so on.

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Next we look at sweep arpeggios and the picking technique behind playing a smooth sweep. He breaks down how to accomplish a fluid sweep

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