Playing clean without right hand muting?

Playing Technique
#1

A few months ago Troy posted a few videos demonstrating how clean he can play without muting the right hand strings, on a distorted amp

He says that the amps compression will “lower the noise floor” when a note is picked and that will drown out all the noise and make it almost inaudible.

Sound cool but does it work on all guitars? Or is there some more trick that I don’t get?

I practiced for a few weeks unplugged, worked on getting my technique sounding clean by perfecting left hand muting and pick the notes a bit harder. It works very well unplugged.

However, plugged in is another story. With the same guitar, when some distortion on, the sound does not clean up, no matter how louad I pick a note, the resonance from the open strings does not go away. And some notes trigger “sympathetic” resonance and it’s super loud and it’s impossible to get rid of without muting the strings with the right hand palm.

The guitar is a PRS SE Akesson. It’s essentially a PRS SE single cut, with a thicker body. It’s a pretty loud guitar when unplugged. It has stock pickups, they are passive humbuckers, I don’tk now if they are considered high output or not.

Tried with another guitar now that is loaded with Lace drop and gain pickups, they are super high output and very “clean” sounding. Playing the same licks through the same rig, sounds clean with no right hand muting. There is a bit of noise but it’s almost inaudible.

So what is the trick or secret that Troy, Marty Friedman, MAB do to play so clean without any right hand muting? Is it the pickups? Troy uses single coils and I thought they were supposed to be noisy. Is it the guitar? Or some settings or some effect in the signal chain?

EDIT:
here is the video the demonstrates this

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#2

It’s a combination of good left hand timing, good right hand rest-stroke (probably the best and most important dampener), and despite how weird it sounds, lowering expectations- which is to say, it seems to go away the less you think about it.

If it really is a signal to noise ratio issue, then I suspect one guitar has the pickup heights a little bit too low.

Also, very few players can sound squeaky clean on an isolated track (Troy is one of them)- but don’t be so quick to judge that everyone can sound like that independent of a mix- hence tempering expectations.

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#3

I too relied heavily on righthand muting to clean up my sound for decades.

The secret is lefthand muting. And the secret to that is learning to deeply examine fretting technique- Being attentive to sounds made when the fingers release the note and during position shifts, playing with a light touch, and consistently fretting notes with the same parts of the fingers. It takes time and attention, but think of how much more control over your sound you will have.

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#4

It’s a combination of good left hand timing, good right hand rest-stroke (probably the best and most important dampener),

I think you probably have not seen the video, I have edited my post with a link to the video.

If it really is a signal to noise ratio issue, then I suspect one guitar has the pickup heights a little bit too low.

OK I could try that

#5

That is the very video I am referencing and one I saw the moment it was uploaded; Troy demonstrates good command over the left hand in addition to the critical rest stroke which allows only the intended notes to sound but mutes the adjacent string almost immediately. Also, there is still a little noise which he sensibly ignores because it’s really irrelevant at that point.

It’s a bit counter intuitive but trying to mute the other strings besides the one in question is just going to hamper the right hand wrist angle (thereby resulting in less proficiency and speed), and increase self-consciousness to the point that each attempt to mute other strings results in more noise because your hand is physically coming into contact with them to actually mute them.

Obviously for slower phrases and fundamentally different approaches like legato can get all the help from the right hand when necessary but sometimes you just have to run like you mean it because no amount of walking will help you run.

Think of it like an athlete after a leg injury. Crutches will help you walk but they won’t help you run and in fact when it comes to running crutches well…become crutches. No matter how painful you have no other choice but to run without them.

Those players such as Friedman are this way because they don’t bother doing the right hand muting as much as we think they do.

#6

I understand and I agree, I don’t think you understand though that I am already doing all of this, the noise that comes out from the PRS SE isn’t from my left hand fingers, it’s just that all the strings resonate. If I pluck one string on the guitar, it causes other ones to resonate. Some notes in particular will cause some strings to ring out more than other.

For example: plucking the 5th fret on the high E string causes the open A string to ring. Not a problem really since they are the same note and they will blend in together.

But if I were to play the 5th fret, and then play 6th fret (on high E string), the open A harmonic will continue to ring and sound like noise. Unless I mute with the left hand.

WIth my high output pickup guitar, the noise from the A string is almost impossible to hear unless I stop playing. Just like in Troy’s video.

With the other guitar, the noise is there, constantly. So while I can play cleanly on that guitar by using right hand muting, I’d rather not, as I feel like the right hand muting is holding me back.

#7

I can completely relate what you are talking about the 2nd paragraph. This is why I am asking those questions, because between the 100% clean tone the open right hand technique, I’ll take the open hand, yes, there is a bit of noise, but it lets me pick every no with much more clarity, giving me an overall better tone.

However you’ve completely lost me on the 3rd paragraph.

I think you don’t understand that I’m not asking advice on playing technique. I’m asking what is going on with the signal chain.

Because in my hands, one guitar sounds good, the other one sounds like a trainwreck. So obviously there has got to be something going on here that is unrelated to my technique.

I’m playing through a line 6 helix lt modeller, through headphones.

Signal chain is very simple: distortion pedal, jcm800 sim, cab sim.

I tried putting a compressor in front, didn’t seem to help (maybe I don’t know how to dial it).

Like you mentioned, it might be the pickup height.

But I’m wondering if it’s the pickups. Now that I think about it, pretty much every high gain shredder out there is using high output pickups.

#8

If you aren’t damping an open string, it’s going to feedback harmonically. That’s really all there is to it. No magic setting on the amp can fix this, because it’s part of the physics of playing electric guitar.

#9

Apologies for any misunderstandings.

If it is a fundamentally guitar construction related issue, then I doubt a pickup change is the solution if one string causes havoc on the others via sympathetic vibration/harmonics. If it is fundamentally a construction issue then it should be happening at most two notes.

But it could be pickup height related if as I said above, the noise to signal ratio is an issue (then increase the height), but if the pickup is causing some weird pull (pretty unlikely for a humbucker) then you may need to bring down the height.

#10

Yes but it’s barely audible on Troy’s video and you can see he’s not muting the open strings and they don’t ring until he stops playing, that is why he only needs to mute while holding a note or before he stops playing. I’m not asking for the some magic setting, but only trying to figure out what is it that explains that I can reproduce this on one guitar and not the other. There has to be an explanation to this.

#11

The noise reduction effect referenced in the video relies on the amp being set loud enough to go into compression when you play, and the fact that he harmonic ringing of the open strings is much quieter than the picked notes. The amp compression makes the background noise quieter along with the rest of the signal. It doesn’t work unless you’re pushing your amp into compression.

You could simulate the effect with an actual compressor, but you may need to choose one that doesn’t add its own noise during compression. Many compressor pedals (e.g. Dynacomp) have noise levels that increase with the amount of active compression. The Engineer’s Thumb is one example of a circuit that does the opposite: It’s noisiest when not compressing, and injected noise reduces as the compression kicks in.

#12

I used to play through a Mesa Triple Rectifier. So, plenty of gain and volume. It’s actually the whole reason I develop and upward pickslant…the only way I could ever get things clean (during solos) was to pronate and use the underside of the base of my thumb to cover the bass strings and keep them from ringing. And I’m pretty sure I was using good enough left hand technique. I cut my teeth on the Speed Kills video by MAB where he outlined always making sure the fretting hand index finger made contact with the string immediately above and below to dampen them. So the ringing I was getting was most likely natural harmonics via sympathetic vibration referenced here:

That’s why I was surprised by that video Troy posted about not needing to do much to mute the bass strings. I was like ‘huh. Would’ve been nice to know that 20 years ago before I went down this DWPS path that’s counter intuitive to most of the phrases I play’.

I’ll admit, I’m still hearing some noise unless I do something to quiet the bass strings now and then. So I’m really interested about all the opinions on here! I’m missing something too.

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#13

Picking too hard - can cause a shed ton of unwanted noise and string resonance. More specifically - Hard blunted picking, meaning a blunted string hit (pick at wrong angle or numerous other reason) has to be hit harder - cause a right old noisy mess. Picking extremely lightly and exactly on the tip or Edge picking - can reduce noise drastically.

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#14

That’s a good point, but nothing should come at the expense of good tone. For certain styles, an aggressive attack is necessary for this. Picking ultra light, to me, has always sounded weak. How good would SRV have sounded if he played lightly? I know tone is subjective, so it could be an empty argument on my part. I personally think Troy’s tone in all the videos I’ve seen kicks ass. To me, it looks like he picks pretty hard. Yet we don’t hear unwanted string noise.

Very true!!!

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#15

For sure - super light picking is a whole other discipline, you can get so so many different tones from it and the combination of pick material and edge thickness/sharpness. I always wary of that certain picking sounds can sound “loud and aggressive” - when in fact they super light. Just mentioned it, because no one else did :slight_smile:

There’s a balance between noise,gain ,picking strength and tone - and the effort required that sometimes becomes overwhelming :stuck_out_tongue:

But my main point above was that a blunt hit - requires a lot harder picking to produce the same tone (Harmonic decay over time) than a 100% sweet hit - and that extra picking strength can produce unwanted noise.

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#16

And maybe that’s the key. I’ve got to find the balance between a hard enough hit that gives me the tone I want, but no extra noise (if the pick aggression is in fact the source of it). After all, there has to be a limit on how hard is necessary to get a good tone. Anything above that is just beating the instrument to death for no good reason.

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#17

If you want to play SRV stuff idiomatically then you need to play in the correct style, that doesn’t make it the appropriate way to play absolutely everything.

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#18

Sure, I’m not advocating playing everything as brutally as he did.

It’s possible I’m conflating things. Years ago it was preached to me by the guy who produced my band’s recordings that we had to ‘play it like a man’ for him to accept the take. We played metal. I probably translated that into ‘One must play hard to get decent tone’. Not always true.

I’m classically trained and I was taught tone production by Julian Gray of the Peabody Conservatory. Ultra light playing in classical guitar isn’t really done other than for emphasizing certain passages as really soft. The bulk of the playing is done at a moderate to moderately loud volume and you must get a decent amount of contact and force to make that happen. Classical guitar purists have no amplification to assist with volume - it all comes from the picking hand. A nice round tone requires moderate force.

So my main point is that if a solution to avoid string noise in electric playing is to play ultra light, it probably comes at the expense of creating a good organic tone. That’s my theory. Maybe there are guys out there who play ultra light and still have really good tone. It could also be that all the electric players whose tone I admire dig in a little, but that there is more to it than that. Guy’s with tone I admire who don’t play lightly:

  • Eric Johnson
  • Zakk Wylde
  • EVH
  • Brad Paisley

Brian May of course makes my whole theory crumble. IMO one of the best tones ever, and in some footage I see almost no right hand pressure at all…granted when this happens he’s using his index finger and playing rest strokes. Rest strokes inherently have so ‘pop’ to them even if it looks like they don’t. They also inherently have a fatter sound than free strokes. So, lots of variables and absolute statements are almost never totally correct :slight_smile: So I’m sure it’s possible in some situation to play lightly on the electric, get a good tone and forego string noise.

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#19

Thank you for mentioning this. I did not realise that, I thought that picking harder would increase clarity and volume of picked notes only. I works well while playing unplugged but I did not realised that with high gain the noise will ring louder and the picked notes won’t get louder, due to the compression.

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#20

I watched the video Twice. Troy obviously manages that. But boy o boy, I am NOT managing that. :man_facepalming:
Back to the drawing board.