Articulations

To articulate a phrase or melody, in fact any musical idea, is to give it your own personal signature. From another perspective, it is imperative to copy the articulations used by a guitarist if you wish to accurately emulate their style. 

For many beginners it is difficult to execute many different articulations, and the different variations from there. When a beginner starts to incorporate this into their playing, they begin to border on intermediate territory. After this, an advanced player begins to develop when they present their own articulations. 

How?

There are so many different ways to articulate a musical idea, let’s discuss a few of them in brief detail (check the TAGA website for more in-depth coverage!). 

Sliding

Sliding into, or out of, a note is a great way to add some flair. You can slide from specific frets, from somewhere at random and vary the direction or distance of the slide. The possibilities are nearly endless!

You can also slide not just single notes, but chords and double-stops too. This gives you options for writing riffs too!

Palm-muting

I have come across palm-muting in many different styles, but it more closely associated with heavier styles. Using palm-muting can help generate a chugging sound, which gives heavier riffs a punchier feel when contrasted with normally played notes and chords. Palm-muting effectively can be difficult because there is the risk of producing a unwanted percussive sound if you press too hard, and not muting the strings enough will not sound quite right – it takes a while to really nail it. 

Staccato

Staccato is the shortening, or the quick muting, of a note or chord. Certain notes and chords lend themselves to this easier, especially when they have no open strings within the chord. You can watch my TAGA video on the technique here!

It is amazing how much more interest you can generate in a simple 8^th note rhythm by just employing some staccato here and there.

Accents

An accent is like the counterpart to staccato. Where the above stops the note, an accent means that it is played louder than the other notes around it. The difficult thing with this technique is knowing how much louder to play it. Because there is no definitive increase in volume for you to adhere to, you are left to guess and the best results come from practice and experience. As long as you can hear an audible difference, then you should be fine – just do not make it too extreme!

Why?

Why season your food? Why wear nice clothes, or drive a car of your choice? These are the things that make us individuals, and as I alluded to before, this is where your personal, signature style begins to take shape.

I also like the sheer variety that we have at our disposal, and articulating certain passages in new ways can help prevent things from getting a little boring from a musician’s standpoint. I have played a few key solos hundreds of times and, whilst they must remain nearly perfect ever time for authenticity, you can start to have a bit of freedom. 

Where Can I Hear This?

Every player approaches this subject different, most of the time subconsciously. However, allow me to present a few of my top choices for seeing how important this is. 

Vibrato – BB King

Ok… I get it. One day I will stop mentioning BB King in my blog posts, but today is not that day. Often categorized as a wide vibrato due to how he rotates his forearm to achieve this vibrato, he can also be very subtle. Another testament as to how important something like this can be with developing your own signature style, is that King’s vibrato with both his guitar and his voice are almost identical. You will often find that this is a trait shared by many lead guitarists that also sing in a front man context. 

Check out any of his live videos to see what I mean!

Palm-muting – Ola Englund

I thought I would include some more contemporary players within this brief list of examples. Ola Englund is a successful YouTuber and businessman as well as being a fantastic metal guitarist. He plays, or has played, with some big names in the metal world and, at the time of writing this post, was in Japan with The Haunted playing the Loudpark metal festival in Tokyo. 

If you subscribe to his channel on YouTube, you will see his long running series of videos called ‘Sundays With Ola’ – at the beginning of each video he performs a riff written for that specific episode. Almost always he demonstrates proficiency with palm-muting, using the technique to give the riffs punch and that synonymous ‘chugging’ sound. 

Accents – Rabea Massaad

Rabea and I studied at the same university, and have met a few times and also have many friends in common, though we do not know each other. His first became popular with being featured on Rob Chapman’s YouTube channel, then as part of the band Dorje. What followed this was an original band called Toska that was a great prog/technical metal outfit, work with Frog Leap Studios and most recently the band Vower. 

Rabea has a very percussive rhythm style, likely helped by the fact that he is a great drummer also. What makes his riffs interesting is that there are a lot of accents and staccato notes that help break things up a bit. There is so much more interest available in a riff without changing time signatures and using weird note groupings. 

Final Thoughts

Just like with a numerical passcode, there exists an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to playing one phrase with any number of articulations. Sometimes students get discouraged when they make great progress with learning chords because they realize just how many there are, and how many variations of each exist, so I offer the same advice now as I do those students – do not worry about it. What you should do is learn a few, experiment with different combinations and be willing to learn something new if you come across it whilst on your musical travels. 

A fun challenge you can try with your teacher is to come up with a simple phrase, and take it in turns to see how many different variations you can come up with. The winner is the one who keeps going.