Marty Friedman's Metal Rhythm Playing

Playing Technique
#1

I’m on a bit of a Marty Friedman kick right now. Been learning a couple of solos he played in Megadeth. He’s every bit as awesome as I remember—killer tonal palette, amazing phrasing and feel. The dude is an incredible lead player, no doubt. His newer stuff is full of insanely tasty playing too.

But I just can’t help but wonder—given his right-hand technique—how the hell did he manage to play metal for all those years without palm muting? How is that even possible? I’ve been playing for decades and have often been complimented on my own “control.” I definitely get that clean playing and left-hand muting go a long way. But you still have to palm mute to play a lot of metal riffs. It’s an essential technique. I can name a gazillion riffs that just can’t be played without it.

Does anyone here have any insight on how Marty pulled this off? It’s honestly kind of bewildering to me.

#2

There are some good vids of him playing with Megadeth in the ‘90s on YouTube. His rhythm technique is pretty similar to Dave’s, and he palm mutes plenty.

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#3

Yeah, it doesn’t look so extreme in that video, I must admit. But he’s talked about his disdain for palm muting, which is why he adopted that extreme right hand technique. I don’t know. I wish I had an isolated track of him playing rhythm. That’d probably tell me what I need to know.

#4

He’s also said that he has disproportionately long arms, and that was the cause of the form he uses. Who knows? More than likely this just worked for whatever reason at an early stage in his playing and he stuck with it, similar to how MAB uses a completely different form for lead playing than he does for rhythm.

Here is a very clear shot of Marty briefly doing some chunky power chord palm muting:

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#5

Marty demonstrates in his interview with Troy that he is definitely capable of palm muting, he just doesn’t like how it sounds for leads. So its not that he can’t palm mute, he just chooses not to for musical reasons.

On another note, in Marty’s autobiography he does talk about how while he got “passable” playing Mustaine’s riffs in a live show context, that he never “mastered” metal rhythm technique the way that Dave did. I imagine that Dave probably handled tracking all the rhythm guitars on the albums and Marty just tracked his leads.

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