GuitarMasterClass - Metal Essentials - Riff #1

GuitarMasterClass
Metal Essentials - Riff #1
By: Darius Wave

Welcome to the Metal Essentials - Riffs #1 lesson!

When most of players hear the magic word "metal", they immedtiately think of palm muting and one direction picking (downpicking). Here's a bite of those metal essentials. Detune your 6th string to D (keep other strings in standard tuning). Touch low strings with your soft part of the right palm. Spend some time to find a sweet spot moving your palm just around 1 inch left and right across the strings. Proper palm muting should have very short sustain, a lot of percussive sound and that specific low boost, right after the hit. From the other side if You move your hand too far to the left, your sound will stay percussive, but will loose an information of what notes are being played, and will loose some of the low boost as well. You also need to find a sweet spot of palm pressure to the strings.

Make sure to use bridge pickup position. It's recommended to have humbucker pickup - it handles more distortion with less noise and it's much more tight/focused in the midrange.

Proper amount of gain (only as much as necessary) will be crucial to keep things clear and tight. Too much gain will destroy good separation between notes, and will make the whole riffing more blurry. Too much gain can cause less effort from player himself, and will affect the overall profit, that could have been taken from the lesson. Learn the roots of metal guitar playing, inspired by 90's metal bands, like Pantera, Megadeth nad partially hard rock band - Disturbed.

Gear used (in order of connection chain placement):

1. Hufschmid Helldunkel All Sapeli guitar
2. Behringer MIC100 tube preamp (-20db switch on, gain and out knobs about 50%)
3. Presonus Inspire 1394 firewire audio interface (input gain 25%)
4. Poulin Legion plug-in:
- Channel - green
- Mode - Lead
- All knobs (eq, drive, input etc.) - 50%
5. Kefir impulse loader (mix 100%)
6. Impulse - Catharsis 2off_preshigh
7. Cubase 7.5 equalizer:
- 1.6 kHz -4dB Q=0.6
- 4.46 kHz - 4,9 dB Q=9.3
- 11.47 kHz - 3.5 dB Q=2.5 Low Pass II mode

Tuning - drop D (E B G D A D)

Backing track progression:

4/4 D5 D/C5 | D/Bb5 D5 E5 | D5 D/C5 | D/Bb5 D5 |
D5 D/C5 | D/Bb5 D5 E5 | D5 D/C5 | D/Bb5 D5 F5 D5 E5 F5 E5 D5 Eb5 |

D5 D/C5 | D/Bb5 D5 E5 | D5 D/C5 | D/Bb5 D5 |
D5 D/C5 | D/Bb5 D5 E5 | D5 D/C5 | D5 |

4/4 D5 D4# | D5 D4# G5 | D5 D4# | D5 F5 G5 |
D5 D4# | D5 D4# G5 | D5 D4# | D |

4/4 Ab6 G6 Gb6 F6 | Gb6 F6 E6 Eb6 F5 | D5 F5 | D5 |
Ab6 G6 Gb6 F6 | Gb6 F6 E6 Eb6 F5 | D5 | D5 |
Ab6 G6 Gb6 F6 | Gb6 F6 E6 Eb6 F5 | D5 | D5 |
Ab6 G6 Gb6 F6 | Gb6 F6 E6 Eb6 F5 | D5 | D5 | D5 | D5 ||


Tempo: Main song tempo is 160 bpm. There are also backing tracks available at 40, 60, 80, 110 and 140 bpm.

Time signature: 4/4

Scales used in this lesson:

D blues scale
D minor scale


Content Runtime: 22mins 17secs

WEBRip Format : MP4 Video codec : H.264 Audio codec : AAC Video : Video: MPEG4 Video (H264) 25fps Audio : Audio: AAC 48000Hz stereo