Rock Guitar Techniques – Part 1
Hey everyone, today I am going through part 1 of a 3 part series on rock guitar techniques.
I’ll be going through everyday techniques along with some unorthodox, uncommon ways to make music on the guitar.
Below you will see the tabulature and a video demonstrating these techniques.
Let’s get started.
1. Behind The Nut String Bends
This technique is great for those of you who do not have a tremolo arm that pulls up. I first became aware of this watching Randy Rhoads playing with Ozzy Osbourne then realized Jimmy Page was also doing this technique with Zep on the
Heartbreaker guitar solo. It is an easy technique and sounds really cool if you dress it up with harmonics like I did in my example below.
2. Palm Muting
Palm muting is very important when playing with a distorted sound. It will make your playing cleaner and it can be used as a great effect that sounds percussive.
We have to use the side of the hand near the bridge to get the technique to work. If you stray too far from the bridge it will not sound right. The example I used was from the solo to a song called “Lay It Down” by a band called Ratt.
3. Pick Scrapes
Pick scrapes are often used as an entrance to a powerful chord, although you can use them creatively in the middle of solos too. Van Halen 1 was my introduction to this technique. Eddie must do it on every song several times.
That album is like a primer for pick scraping lol!
4. Harmonics
So these are technically called “natural harmonics,” meaning they are produced by simply lightly touching above a fret on a string and then picking the string. Harmonics create a high chiming sound.
If you listen to the beginning of Pride (In The Name Of Love) by U2 you can hear this technique on display. It takes a light touch and some gain on the sound. Use the bridge pickup for maximum output.
Below is the tab for all 4 examples and the video demonstration
Thanks for reading and check back soon for part 2!
Part 1 Rock techniques