I've seen some players like John Frusciante, SRV, and Henry Garza from Lonely Boys tend to mute all the strings they're not using when soloing with just the left hand. How can this be accomplished? There always seem to be lots of harmonics ringing out, especially with high gain.. I'm confused

anyone??

Non of them players used todays excessive gain levels. Also there are harmonicaly dead spots on the guitar neck 1st, 2nd, 10th frets. Bet they lowered the guitars volume too.

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Hi imc_1121: muting (with either hand) is one of the skills of guitar playing. As you progress you will discover ways of touching bits of fingers against strings that don't ring in a given chord so as to silence them. Eventually that will become part of that chord shape for you without even thinking about it.

Just for example, try playing a full C major chord at the nut. Your third finger holds the root note at the third fret on the A string - and learns to just touch its tip against the E string to stop it sounding. (Unless of course you deliberately leave the E to ring in order to play a first inversion of the chord - but if so you should be doing that on purpose, not just because you don't know how to mute it.)

And to wander off in a different direction, many people who are starting out with slide guitar don't realise that half the art of the thing is muting all the strings behind the slide with the first two or three fingers (depending on which finger you wear your slide) to stop all those extraneous squeals between there and the nut. Meanwhile, your right hand should be muting the unsounded strings between the slide and the bridge.

Good slide players treat you to the notes they want you to hear and keep the overtones to a minimum.

Some thoughts.

Cheers - C

Yes. I'm an amateur player but know about muting strings when playing chords, the thing that frustrates me is just playing one note when soloing and muting the rest of the strings.

I've been doing this my whole life and pretty much unconsciously. Both for chords and single note work. When you're playing single notes you don't need to try and mute all of the rest of the strings, just the strings in the the general vicinity of the note you're playing.

It's kind of an insurance policy against sloppy pick hand work. You can accidentally hit an adjacent string and not pay the penalty.

Frankly I think that all experienced players learn to do this to some extent. I just makes sense.

And if you think plain old guitar players are doing a lot of string muting, try playing slide guitar. You can't survive playing slide without learning to mute other strings.

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