While seldom, if ever, encountered in classical music featuring the guitar, palm muting is now a standard technique among guitar players who play with a plectrum ("pick"). Palm muting is so widely used as to be idiomatic in hard rock, heavy metal, and particularly thrash or speed metal, but it is often found in any style of music that features electric guitars with distortion in the signal's pre-amplification stage.
In guitar tablature, palm mutes are rendered with an X when the tonality is not important, and otherwise with the abbreviation PM. Palm mutes are sometimes executed by strumming[?], so there are often two palm mutes in a beat (one for downstrum, one for upstrum):
e |--x--x--| B |--x--x--| G |--x--x--| D |--x--x--| A |--x--x--| E |--x--x--|
One popular song with palm muting is "Santa Monica" by Everclear[?]
e |------------------x-x-x-x--------------x-x-x-x| B |------------------x-x-x-x--------------x-x-x-x| G |------------------x-x-x-x--------------x-x-x-x| D |------------------x-x-x-x--------------x-x-x-x| A |-5-5--5-5-5-5-5-5-x-x-x-x--5-5-5-5-5-5-x-x-x-x| E |-3-3--3-3-0-0-3-3-x-x-x-x--3-3-0-0-3-3-x-x-x-x|
Palm muting can also be heard in The Animals' "House of the Rising Sun", and is employed on both acoustic and electric guitars by Al Di Meola[?]. One example of the technique's use on acoustic guitar may be found in Di Meola's "Mediterranean Sundance".
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump