Name That Guitar Technique: Matt Good edition.

Name That Guitar Technique: Matt Good edition.

Long time lurker, first time poster. I'm trying to figure out how the guitar intros to a couple of Matt Good tracks are played, from a technique/effects perspective. The tracks in question are "Double Life" (from Avalanche) and "Load Me Up" (from Beautiful Midnight). You can hear the technique in the first 25 seconds of the iTunes Music Store sample for "Double Life" or from 17-35-ish in the iTMS sample for the album version of "Load Me Up."

The effect is I think either strum-palmmute-strum or just "rapid sequence of hammer ons + ridiculous gain/feedback." I've also mucked around with a gate pedal simulation to get the hard cutoff, but I can't make it sound quite right or consistent. Any thoughts on how this was done?

I would just ask an instructor, but I'm in a broke, busy, self-teaching gradnstudent phase of my life at the moment.. hope this is an appropriate use of Music Talk; if the mods want I'll be glad to have this closed up and repost in AskMe.

posted by Alterscape (5 comments total)

Sounds like a combination of palm muting and left hand muting to me. There may be some gating in there. It sounds very achievable to me. To get it really clean you would do some audio edits in Logic/Protools/your DAW of choice.
posted by unSane at 7:39 PM on September 4, 2011

Thank you for the confirmation/information, unSane. I guess the answer is "practice more!"
posted by Alterscape at 8:19 AM on September 5, 2011

I don't think there's any gating going on, especially because you can hear the quieter sliding notes clearly. I think it's hammering on with the fret hand (for sure), maybe augmented by muting in between with the strumming hand.
posted by chimaera at 3:25 PM on September 5, 2011

hope this is an appropriate use of Music Talk; if the mods want I'll be glad to have this closed up and repost in AskMe.

Nah, this is totally fine.
posted by cortex at 8:39 AM on September 6, 2011

From memory, it's pretty high saturation distortion with a lot of brightness out of a Marshal Stack. Try moving your right hand palm muting around to find the sweet spot on your guitar to get this. I would reckon he's using the Boss Turbo Distortion DS-2. Total guess though and yeah, this is very achievable.
posted by dobie at 11:29 AM on September 6, 2011 [1 favorite]