How To Play Metal Rhythm Guitar Riffs That Sound Tight & Clean
Playing tight metal guitar riffs sounds badass and feels amazing.
However...
Too many guitarists don't know how to effectively separate the individual notes in their riffs. Result: Their rhythm guitar playing sounds like a sloppy mess.
Don't end up like this!
Knowing how to use excellent muting technique in both hands keeps your rhythm guitar riffs perfectly tight and clean.
Sound good?
Thought so!
Watch the video below and learn exactly how to do it, so you can start playing badass rhythm guitar riffs right away.
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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Now that you have learned how to improve your rhythm guitar playing, integrate what you’ve learned with these cool lead guitar ideas:
3 Sweep Picking Skills You Must Have Before You Can Play Creatively
It’s much less difficult to play creative sweep picking arpeggios once you have mastered a few key skills.
The following are the 3 skills you need to get better at right now to make playing creatively feel easier:
Skill #1. Finger Rolling Technique
A lot of sweep picking patterns contain segments that require rolling your fretting hand fingers to prevent strings from ringing out together. When you don't develop this skill, the notes of your arpeggios become a sloppy mess.
Focus on improving your rolling technique by practicing a small section on an arpeggio pattern using just two notes on two strings.
Roll your finger back and forth while continually picking the notes to fix your timing and keep the strings from ringing together.
Add another string to the arpeggio pattern once you are able to do this cleanly for 10-15 repetitions.
Skill #2. The Hammer Ons/Pull Offs That Occur On The Lowest And Highest Notes
It’s common for guitar players to rush the hammer ons/pull offs of the highest and lowest notes in their arpeggios.
This causes your arpeggios to sound sloppy.
When you practice sweep picking, make these parts of the arpeggio as clean and articulated as possible. For instance, if you are playing an arpeggio pattern that uses only 16th notes, make it your goal to play every consistently in time.
Skill #3. Using A Picking Motion That Is Smooth
One of the easiest ways to make your sweep picking sound sloppy is to pick each string using individual motions. This is happens frequently when guitarists stop the sweeping motion of the pick at a challenging point in the arpeggio pattern.
This brings your hand away from the strings and kills the momentum you need to sweep smoothly and effectively.
Instead of doing this, push your pick through the strings while ascending and pull your hand back while descending. This makes it so that there are only two motions per arpeggio (one to ascend and one to descend). Watch your hand while performing the sweeping motion to make sure you stay consistent.
Why Directional Picking Is The Shortcut To Awesome Guitar Speed
You avoid the frustration that comes from not being able to play fast and clean when you take a shortcut. That shortcut is learning how to use directional picking.
Directional picking is a shortcut that saves you tons of energy and movement for faster speed.
Shortcuts help you play much more efficiently in order to get a massively beneficial result that improves your guitar playing for the long run. Finding shortcuts in your guitar playing should not be about using incorrect or inefficient playing methods just to get by.
Many guitarists fall into this trap just for the sake of being able to stumble through a guitar lick they want to play. Using shortcuts in this manner creates bad habits that end up slowing down your guitar playing progress.
When you find legitimate types of shortcuts, you make tons of progress fast. Try to find these types whenever you can.
Here’s How Directional Picking Is A Shortcut Compared To Alternate Picking
Alternate picking means strictly alternating pick strokes no matter what. This makes it much harder to play cleanly at fast speeds.
Directional picking saves tons of movement in your picking technique. It works by creating the shortest possible path to the next note you play. Using this approach may require alternate picking or sweep picking depending on the situation.
This makes your technique more efficient and enables you to play cleanly at fast speeds. In contrast, using alternate picking often leads to using an excessive amount of picking motion.
How To Make Huge Improvements To Your Guitar Playing With Small Adjustments
It is possible to improve your guitar playing in a huge way by changing only a few things.
For instance: using a more efficient picking approach, altering the way you mute string noise, adding/removing items from your practice routine, etc.
An amazingly powerful method for improving your playing technique is switching how you pick notes from the common approach of only using alternate picking to using directional picking.
Directional picking takes the shortest path to get from one note to the next. It may use alternate picking or sweep picking depending on the scenario.
Using directional picking makes tiny adjustments that benefit your guitar playing in two BIG ways:
Directional Picking Benefit #1. Your Guitar Practice Becomes A Lot More Efficient
Directional picking commonly uses a sweep picking movement while switching strings. By practicing directional picking, you are simultaneously practicing sweep picking. This means you get the benefit of practicing two skills for the time it takes to practice one.
When you practice with this approach, you save time and get better at guitar much faster. By only practicing with alternate picking, you would miss out on this massive benefit and your practice would be less efficient.
Directional Picking Benefit #2. Your Picking Technique Becomes More Efficient
Directional picking eliminates tons of excess movement that comes from using alternate picking exclusively.
For example, most guitar players use 100% alternate picking to play through a 5 string, 3 note per string scale. This means picking every note by alternating and upstroke and a downstroke for a total of 15 picking motions.
Directional picking uses sweep picking to cut down the total picking motions to 11 while removing inefficient movement. This makes it possible to play at very fast speeds with higher accuracy and less effort.
You should be convinced by these two benefits alone that directional picking is a style you need to adopt. When you master it, you transform your guitar playing and make it easy to play with speed.
Taking guitar lessons with a teacher is a great way to improve your rhythm guitar playing fast. Just ask some of my students:
“I found Tom Hess on the net through articles, and I read quite a few of those before I went to Tom’s website. Even though I’m not a metal player at all, and Tom is obviously a metal player, I could still see that his ideas and way of teaching could really benefit me. So I pretty much signed up for online guitar lessons with Tom straight away once I’d gone through the website, and it’s just been a real eye opener with the way he teaches…”
... the integration of concepts that he’ll give you and having a really structured strategy… not just week to week lessons, but things that - you can see from one lesson to the next - really develop and continue to work on your technique and your theory and aural skills and those types of things. So I’d played a long time… 20 years before I really caught onto Tom, and I’d had a lot of lessons, and I’d taught and played but I can really see improvements in my technique, sweeping, and picking which weren’t strong parts of my playing.
I feel like Tom has a good gauge of where you’re at as a guitar player and what you need, and there just seemed to be so much more stuff in the lessons week to week than what you’d ever get in an hour or so in a one on one lesson… way more. So yeah I think that and the forum. I think, I’d pay the money just for the forum. That alone would be fine… I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. So that alone is massive!
The price for the lessons, that’s nothing... nothing. You know, I think it’s, pretty cheap to be honest. I don’t mean that in a bad way, cheap. Cheap is not a good word, but I just think it’s great value… awesome value. I mean, you know, you could pay that for one-to-one lessons and you just don’t get the same results and support of the forum and the content and the strategies.
Other teachers I’ve had have been good players, and some have become good friends too. But when I’ve started lessons with Tom I’ve got something to compare that to and a lot of it is just sort of teaching songs from week to week… a lot of the lesson will be left up to you… you’ll go to your lesson and they’ll be like what do you want to do today? At the time I said, oh do this song or that song, but with Tom you start to realize that you know, there’s more to it… the goals and you know he’s sort of more in contact with what you want to be able to do as a player, because he’s asking you the questions and then setting up the strategies, so I find that really good.
Yeah I can see more results in 18 months in a lot of areas in my playing than you know 20 years. So it’s sort of, you know, would’ve been great 20 years ago to have met Tom.
Simon Candy, Melbourne, Australia
When I started learning from Tom, the main thing that made him different from other teachers was that he was showing me how to excel in all aspects of my guitar playing by applying the skills that I already knew together with the new material that I was learning from him.
He made me aware of both strengths and weaknesses in my playing that I did not even know I had. From there he gave me the knowledge, tools and guidance to literally transform my guitar playing by enabling me to overcome things that were preventing me from becoming a truly creative and self-expressive guitar player. These were the kinds of things that none of my previous guitar teachers and books I studied were able to do for me.
After Tom made me aware of all the things I was missing in my guitar playing and provided me with the strategy and tools for solving them, I began to make very fast progress in all areas of my guitar playing.
I can now write my own music and can create lead guitar solos that I am happy and fulfilled with. I also have the technical skills to confidently and easily play anything that I want to express. I have overcome all of the lead guitar challenges that I struggled with before, and increased my guitar speed to virtuoso levels. More importantly, I have the knowledge and understanding of how to continually improve my guitar playing and musical skills to higher and higher levels to continue expressing myself with my music. Overall, I have definitely transformed in a huge way as a musician and as a person through my lessons with Tom Hess. I am grateful to him for guiding me towards becoming the guitarist I always wanted to be!"
Mike Philippov, Indiana, USA
“At the time when I decided to sign up for online guitar lessons with Tom, I didn’t really have specific goals in mind, so when I was filling out his page, when I signed up for lessons, he asked a lot of questions about where are you at now, and what do you want to become, what do you want to achieve…”
I’m not 100% as goal oriented as Tom is, but it’s a good example of how you should do it in your life.
One of the differences between Tom Hess and other guitar teachers is that the lessons are huge and you never lose anything. You always have your guitar lesson in your account and you can download it. The volume of the things described in the lesson is not like “to do this until the next lesson”... it’s some examples with a lot more general stuff you can implement and use for years... to master. When you try to get some ideas from friends... some tricks... it’s almost always not so wide spread, you get only one specific thing to learn and you may not even be able to implement it into your own guitar playing. In Tom’s lessons, he shows you the way to implement any technique and integrate all the things together..
If you receive your lesson and have a hard time grasping things from it, it’s almost 100% you’ll find a topic on the same thing on the forum where there are already a lot of things explained by a lot more experienced guys. There are a lot of discussions going on and you can immediately get your answers. I have my answers immediately all the time. But I don’t really have that much questions. The single most important thing for me that I got from the forums is a full understanding of how modes and scales work. There are a lot of things about music theory in the forums.
Vasily Rusakovich, Minsk, Belarus
Want to learn how to combine tight rhythm guitar riffs with creative leads? It's easier than you think! Get started now by taking online lessons for rock guitar.