Dustin's kickass lessons: Massive Heaviness and Getting the Sound You Like To be a professional musician, one of the most important things about you is your sound. You have to sound good!! Some people think that all you need to do is hook up a distortion pedal, turn your amp to 10 and jam. Belive me, you will sound like CRAP!!! Trust me I used to think that too at one time. In this lesson, I am going to help you out with achieving the sound that you like and also work on some palm muting. Now when I say good sounding, I dont mean go buying $1000 Marshall amps and the most expensive distortion pedal you can find. You can achieve a perfectly good sound with a smaller amp. Sure, Marshalls would be nice to have, but hey. No one can get Marshalls. If you are on a low budget, you can still achieve a decent sound for your buck. It would actually help if your amp had at least a 3 band Equalizer. If not, that's alright. Maybe your pedal does. If your pedal dosent have any EQ switches on it, that could hurt quite a bit, but not much. First of all, what has helped me was plugging in without anything and adjusting the volume on the amp. Once you get the volume set to a level that you like, plug in the pedal. First try turning the distortion knob (if it has one) all the way up, then turn the volume control all the way down on the pedal. Then slowly turn the volume knob up until the volume is set to an enjoyable level. If your pedal has a tone switch on it, turn that all the way up. This will make it sound better than if it was turned down. If you do have an Equalizer, you're in luck. Just plug in the distortion and turn the Lows and the Highs all the way up. Then mess with the Mids until you reach the sound you like. Another thing you would probably like to know, most early metal bands (like Metallica, Motley Crue, Ozzy, Whitesnake, etc) had their Mids turned up a bit. As the years went by, Mids were slowly being turned down, and that is why the metal sound is so deep today. Now that you have your distortion level, its time to screw with other knobs on your amp. One very important knob is the Reverb knob. It kind of generates a small echo and helps with sustain. Play with the reverb until you like the way its set up, then play with the other knobs. Now if you see a Bass knob, turn that all the way up, you'll need that. If you see Treble, better turn that all the way up too. If you leave it off, you will get a really weird sound. Just play with everything else until it suits to your liking. It's time to practice palm muting. A good palm muting exercise is Ex.1 on the Speeding lesson. In This lesson, I will teach you about using power chords with palm muting. This was recorded in sixteenth notes and is in 4/4 time. This is taken from a cool Motley Crue song (I think the name of it is Little Pill or Bitter Pill or something like that). Ex.1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --5-----------------6-----------------7------7-----------7-----7--------------------- --5-----------------6-----------------7------7-----------7-----7--------------------- --3--0-0-0-0-0-0-0--4--0-0-0-0-0-0-0--5--0-0-5-0--5-6-7--5-0-0-5-0--5-6-7------------ Dustin Mitchell lord_magus@hotmail.com