How do you make palm mutes louder?

the-trooper

the-trooper

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I play at low gain by today's standards, let's call it moderate, and as a result when I have a part that is palm muted it sounds quiet and weak. Especially compared to open played chords which fill out whole frequency spectrum and come out nicely, and then I start palm muting and I disappear. One solution would be "add a compressor". Not a fan. It works for recording, but live it kills the dynamics and makes everything sound distant.
And then you add volume, and then drummer starts banging harder, and then bassist adds volume... Sigh...

Any one using any other tricks, aside from setting some boost or amp channel change and dance on the switches.
 
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It’s a bit of a relationship between your right hand, where you’re muting and how the amp is set.

Before you even move onto tone stuff, check out the differences in attack depending on where your picking hand is muting the strings; the closer you get to the neck, the more muted it will be, the closer to to the bridge and you can still get some resonance occurring after the mute, finding the right spot to deliver exactly the kind of mute your going for takes a little bit of research. It’s different on every guitar for me, depending on the bridge.

Then your picking hand, you need to give those strings a good smack. Keeping your hand anchored on the strings will help keep things clean. I tend to balance off my pinky/ring finger and the leverage I get allows me to back the pick up enough and come down on the strings to give them a good whack.

The smoother the tone you have, the less prominent they’re going to be. Dropping some mids, especially lower mids, goes a long way, as well as pushing up the highs a bit. This is one area where more bass isn’t going to help you out as you start losing definition the more you add in.
 
DrewJD82 said:
The smoother the tone you have, the less prominent they’re going to be. Dropping some mids, especially lower mids, goes a long way, as well as pushing up the highs a bit.
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This sounds worth trying out.
I love "liquid smoothness" for solos (think Petrucci), but low gain for rhythm. But my EQ on amp is set pretty similar for both channels, just boosting mids for solo.
Will experiment with it.
 
more speakers? doesnt mean you have to be louder but i feel like it makes the palm mutes rattle your chest more.

i do think its gotta be technique though at the end of the day. mine is not great by any means but i can hear when its better and notice it more. so it probably boils down to focus and the stuff Drew and Jive said.
 
Yes, digging in more will help a ton!
I like to find the point where the notes go sharp, then I back off the pressure a little from there. That tends to be my 'sweet spot'.
 
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If you want a close dynamic between all of the things that you do actually play more gently. If that’s still not enough try lighter strings. There is no way that harder or heavier narrows the dynamic range.
 
when I first started playing drums I hit everything as hard as I could all the time. My drum teacher taught me to play at a medium volume so I had somewhere to go (louder) when needed for accents.

I’d try to get the volumes as close as you can get unplugged first, then start fiddling with the tone stuff later.
 
You almost gave yourself the right answer.

Add the RIGHT compressor. I’m not a fan of many in pedal form. The Keely 4 knob would be my go to. Set the attack back a little bit. You shouldn’t be getting overall louder, just evening out the quiet parts, in this case the mutes. A dynacomp, baaah. Not for me. You can actually use the attack and release to ENHANCE your dynamics.

Attacking this from another direction would be an expander which work’s opposite of a compressor by making the quiet parts louder. I couldn’t recommend one and never really used one.
 
I had to up the gain a bit for that song.
It just wasn't working because the gain is so low, when palm muting it basically sounds like a clean rake and it wasn't coming out, and I'm not constantly switching channels to keep 100% sound of a studio recorded song.
 
the-trooper said:
I had to up the gain a bit for that song.
It just wasn't working because the gain is so low, when palm muting it basically sounds like a clean rake and it wasn't coming out, and I'm not constantly switching channels to keep 100% sound of a studio recorded song.
Click to expand...

I mentioned this elsewhere, but I recently learned how the older Marshalls can have quit a bit of distortion going on them but sound fairly clean on a recording with the other instruments going and the distortion only stands out when the guitars are doing something on their own/it’s less busy. I wonder if that’s what you’re hearing between the palm mutes.

This one song I’ve been working on is using a Superlead the entire time, when playing by myself it’s pretty gained out, right around early EVH levels of gain but not quite there, but once everything else gets mixed into the picture, it sounds more clean than dirty.
 
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