Heavy Metal Guitar Lessons – Who Needs Them?

Heavy Metal Guitar Lessons – Who Needs Them?
Heavy metal music was a long time coming and it looks like it’s here to stay. From Link Wray in the nineteen fifties to The Kinks and The Yardbirds in the sixties through Led Zeppelin and Def Leppard the loud and dangerous guitar sound still captures the imagination of fans around the world.

If you want to learn to play heavy metal guitar, you need to know which guitarists to listen to. No matter how much music you have listened to, there’s bound to be some big names that you have ignored. Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple, Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath are the true masters of the looming doom guitar style.

Jimmy Page, founder and lead guitarist with Led Zeppelin did not really play metal but he invented many classic riffs and contributed to the folklore of onstage posing. James Hatfield of Metallica is the master of the down-stroke picking style. Eddie Van Halen gave the world two-handed fretboard tapping in a big way.

There are many other great metal guitar players – Randy Rhoads, Dave Mustain, Adrian Smith and Michael Schenker to name a few. Zakk Wylde, Yngwie Malmsteen and Jimi Hendrix to throw in some who contributed greatly to loud guitar.

You can learn so much from just watching a great guitar player but if you are going to take heavy metal guitar lessons you may as well define what you are going to be learning.

For a menace-laden music, minor scales like the minor pentatonic will be the order of the day. Learn the minor pentatonic in A, B, D and E. Techniques you will be using to play the music will include hammer-ons, tapping and alternate picking.

Harmonics are a well-used feature of heavy metal. You can get the idea of harmonics by placing the tip of the first finger of your left hand over the sixth string at the fifth fret and pick the note.

One technique that requires a bit of practice is palm muting. It means you rest the heel of your right hand on the strings as you strum them. The description doesn’t evoke what you hear when the technique is used on an electric guitar.

Here is a video lesson on palm muting:

Another important element of heavy metal music is the power chord. A power chord is made up of the root and the fifth of a chord. It can be used in any context as it is neither major or minor. But it sounds great through distortion and is easy to play.

When you first learn to play guitar you will learn about concert pitch. It’s the pitch that all guitarists tune their instruments to so that when they play together they will be in tune. Metal guitar players tune their guitars down between a half step and two steps. Some guitarists will just tune the bottom E string to D. This is called Drop D Tuning.

This is just a quick look at the main elements of heavy metal guitar playing. Listen and watch some of the guitarists I have mentioned and try some of the techniques before you go looking for a teacher.

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