Palm Muting

A fun and very cool sounding technique that is used often by players of all sorts is palm muting.

This technique makes it so that your strings sound muffled and "bouncy". Some players consider it to be the closest thing to an upright bass sound on the electric.

Because it doesn't always sound all that clear, it's best used when there isn't a lot already going on in the line, but you feel that you want or need to add something to get more of a rhythmic feel.

This technique is played much in the same way as you would play chords.

To use this technique, you place the fleshy part of your hand against the strings near the Bridge. You don't want to be too close to the neck since you may not be able to get any sound from the pickups if you stop the strings from vibrating so that they can reach them. The closer to the Bridge, the better.