Heavy metal is one of the most difficult to play genres in the world. Most metal riffs require high – speed picking and squealing and stuff and really require an impressive amount of skills. That’s why most metal musicians are admired because of this. Not only on the field of guitar playing but also in bass, drums and piano playing as well. Metal is all about speed and brutality. Metal fans always look for those qualities in a song that’s why you can’t just go around playing metal if you don’t have sufficient skills.
That is why today, I will give you some of the techniques that metal music uses so that you would know which direction you would take and you could start practicing these said techniques. Mind you, this is not only applicable to metal music but to other genres as well.
Pick Scream – also called as the pinch harmonics. It is the simplest technique in metal guitar playing. How to do this? Simply pluck the string to produce a certain note and while plucking it, make a scooping motion that would enable your thumb to barely touch the string that you picked. This would produce a high – pitched screaming note, especially when plugged into a distortion pedal.
Economy picking and Alternate picking – alternate picking is picking the strings alternately. Hitting two notes. Economy picking is also a variant of alternate picking except when you are about to go to the adjacent string, you sweep down to the first note of the adjacent string instead alternately picking it up or down again.
