Your Chords Sound SLOPPY Because You're Not Doing THIS [Guitar Technique]
Do you find that when you're playing guitar, there are constantly extra strings ringing out?
And no matter how hard you try, even when it seems like you're being as surgically precise as a NASA engineer performing open-heart surgery on a hummingbird, there are still other strings ringing?
Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but the strings on your guitar are going to ring unless you are actively muting them.
No amount of picking accuracy is going to solve this problem, because strings will start ringing for more reasons than just hitting them with the pick.
- They can start ringing sympathetically, meaning a certain note will cause a completely unrelated string to vibrate like it just heard the juiciest piece of gossip.
- They can ring because your elbow bumped the guitar,
- or because someone in the next room sneezed,
- or because Mercury is in retrograde,
- or because they still haven't forgiven you for what happened in 2002,
- or because a dog barked three streets away and your G string took that personally,
- or simply because that's just what they feel like doing in that particular moment.
The point is, your strings are going to ring. It's their whole personality.
(If guitar strings had a dating profile, under hobbies it would just say "ringing when unwanted" and "ruining your recordings.")
So unless you take some initiative and put a stop to it, they're going to keep doing it!
Now, typically when people think about muting their guitar strings, they'll think of palm muting. Well, what if you want to be strumming? What if the strings ringing out are on the other side of the guitar from your palm (i.e. the higher strings...), laughing at you from a safe distance?
All of these issues create the need for another type of muting you probably aren't doing, which is left hand muting.
(Or right hand muting if you're left handed... mh... Fretting hand muting. Muting with your fretting hand. Look, we're going to be here all day if we keep accommodating every possible hand configuration. Fretting hand. Final answer.)
"But I thought my fretting hand was for fretting! How am I to mute the strings with the same hand I fret the notes? What's next, breakfast for dinner? Dogs living with cats? Using a fork as a backscratcher? Actually, that last one works great, but STILL."
That's right, your left hand fretting hand actually has two jobs.
(It's the unpaid intern of your guitar technique — expected to do everything, trained for none of it, and somehow still the only reason the whole operation doesn't fall apart. Meanwhile, the picking hand just shows up, does one thing, and takes all the credit. Classic.)
While this may seem impossible, it's actually easier than you think. In the video below, I'll explain how to get started on left hand muting muting with your fretting hand.
If you have never ever had this problem before with the chords you're playing, it's probably because you haven't learned any chords that are interesting enough to present the problem! If you want to learn some fancy new chords, and develop a much better understanding of how chords and harmony function on the guitar in general, check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course!
Video Transcription
Hello Internet, so nice to see you! Often when we play complex chords on the guitar, we have situations where we have to play some strings and not play some other strings. And people, my students always ask me, how do I strum chords where I have some strings that should ring and some strings that shouldn't ring?
Well, the first thing will be, maybe don't strum them. Okay, maybe pick the individual strings, but sometimes you have to strum them. That's what we do. So a student asked me that, and we went down in detail, in real deep detail, on how to deal with those situations on the guitar.
If you have any problem playing your chords cleanly, you want to watch this lesson. So let's go. It's specifically on strings 3, 4, and 5. When I strum, mainly I'll get the low E string going. Yes. And it's stronger than the mute that I put on it with my fingertip.
And this is only when I use a pick. Like if I... Like. See. 513, 135, 351, 513. And that would be the, you know, the song. So if I could play that and just like string that 5-1-3. So here's how you proceed.
If you were on the high string, I would tell you to use the thumb to touch the sixth string. But now you are up by here, in the thumb. I mean, it's possible that it kind of restricts the movement a lot at this point.
Yes. Get doable, but uncomfortable. Instead, I say this. First, relax your hand. You're going to need it. Then, whatever triad you play, you're going to have at least one finger free. It's going to happen all the time because you have only three notes.
And you have four fingers. So in this case, you have the middle finger free, right? Yes. Touch the sixth string with the middle finger. And the index finger can touch string one and two. Good. Now stay there.
Just relax your finger by the movement. Once they're relaxed, play the F sharp minor. Now you have a ring finger free. Just relax that finger and put it there. Press the other three. You have to pay attention to not press with that finger and just relaxing and touching the other strings.
It's a bit awkward at first. Then you relax the fingers, go in the next position where you have E minor. You have the ring finger and the pinky finger free. And you stop the first two with the index finger.
How I see. If it's awkward, you can always do this. But yeah, those three strings playing and those two muted. Yeah, I'm getting. I'm accidentally pressing down. Yeah, in that case, move the index finger slightly higher.
Yeah, because I'm borrowing these two strings, my index fingers. Yeah, again, if you're borrowing and it's not, and you're hitting this, then move it a bit higher. Higher in this direction. Oh, I see.
Oh, I see. Yes. Until you get the right moment where you're muting. And then put back the middle finger. Yeah. Make sense? Yes. Yes. Again, it's a bit awkward at first because now you're working with micro variables.
It's not just fretting that note with that finger, that position, etc. It's also position the finger exactly inside that. Oh, yes. So that takes a little bit, but if you practice this way, and again very slowly at first, it becomes second nature.
You would have another solution here, which would be move everything on the bottom three strings, but anyway, here. Actually here, no? Oh, that's, yeah, the E is a little bit tough. I only have 22 frets.
No, no, no, no, no, no. You don't need that. I mean, if you think of the notes you're playing here, F sharp, B, D, you find them here, at the 14th fret, F sharp, B. Then at this point it becomes a matter of sound.
Which sound do you like? It's also a matter of comfort, of course, but do you like better the sound of the thick string shorter or of the slightly thinner string longer? So you want to try both and see which one makes more sense to you?
Yes. Oh, yes. I suppose I could move it up here as well. You could, you could, but then the sound starts changing now because if you put this up up by up by here, now you have two unwound strings rather than one.
Oh, yes. And it starts to sound a bit... I mean, you can. Oh, yes. But the sound is different. Yes. Okay, so at this point, when you do those things, especially on a clean sound, the character of the string really matters.
Yes. And the mood can be very different. So at this point, you have to start thinking sonically, what do I want? But that's the technique to do it in those cases. And when you are apply here, I'll just put the bar and not bar.
And then when I do the F sharp minor, I will do this and I will put the middle finger only those two notes that I want and use the middle finger to cover low strings. It does become second nature. You need to get used to it.
But the idea is you study the position of the chord, so you fret what you want to fret, and you use the three fingers to stop all the other. Alright. So I just go through one at a time and just strategize which bit of flesh I need touching.
And again, since there are not that many shapes, your finger will get an idea and then we'll do it automatically eventually. Oh, yes. Oh, good. Yes. That's it. That's the idea. That's how you do it.