Muting help

Hello everyone in the Realm of the Dman.

Well I've been playing for about 3 months now, and I am getting fairly confident in all the basics. But One thing I am struggling with is muting strings. I cant seem to find a decent way of going about it. So if anyone would like to throw some tips my way, or point me to a good place with this info, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

Muting as in how?

Palm muting, so that you're playing slightly muted notes, or muting the strings that you're not playing? A little description of what it is you do & what happens will help us point you in the right way

I'm going to assume that you're speaking of actual muting, as opposed to palm muting. The basic idea of muting is very important to get correct on bass. This is due to how chords sound out in a very ugly fasion with a few exceptions. The notes you don't play are more important than the notes you play.

You should mute with both your right hand and left hand.

-Your left hand should have any unused fingers resting on the strings not being played in a manner that's most comfortable and efficient. That means somewhere where you won't have to switch around too much to play the next note. This is to stop the concept known as harmonic ringing where strings that you haven't played naturally vibrate. To stop a note you just fretted, you can lift your finger off of it while still holding the string, this is shown in a video courtesy of D'man -- but I'm unable to find it right now. It's one of his RHCP lessons.

-Your right hand is something that's up to personal preference. There are two main ways of going about this, you can use your thumb to rest on the string(s) above the current one you're playing, resting it on and against them. This is what I do naturally.

If you have trouble with this, try resting your thumb on the E string while you're playing any other string. I had difficulty getting my thumb around quick enough, but once I started conciously doing this the rest of it came naturally.

You can also use your fingers as you play to do this. Playing the A string and as you play, have your index/middle finger come to rest on the E string. This video by Smaz over here shows this well.

Smaz wrote:Short vid:

To stop the string below ringing, your finger should come to rest on it after playing the string above it. So if you play an open E, then 5th fret A string, you should mute the E string when you play the A naturally. As for then stopping the string above, just lift your fingers slightly so you're no longer fretting the note

http://smaz.co.uk/bass/vidforfuzzy.wmv

Video only shows what I mean, it's nothing special

Any help?

https://freebasslessons.forumotion.com/general-chat-f3/just-curious-t214.htm

http://www.studybass.com/lessons/bass-technique/plucking/ (Flash lesson, shows what I was talking about, text form below it.)

If you were talking about palm muting, all this typing was a waste, but hey, always a copy-paste reference!

Proto hit it on the head.

I've always used my thumb to mute the sting above. It just naturally happened when I first started playing. So, thats not an issue. Really my problem comes from the stings below, which I don't really see an easy way to mute with my right hand. So I guess I just gotta work on placing my left hand better to mute them.

Thanks for the info!

yea, this was, and probably still IS a problem with me. Especially with fast tempoed songs with a lot of string skipping, to keep that clear clean sound you have to mute accurately and at precise times or else it sounds either A) Muddy from not enough muting or B) Halted for muting to early.