Welcome to the Metal Rhythm Guitar course with your new teacher, Joss Allen. Strap in for some heavy riffs! Note that Joss's guitar is tuned to Eb for this course. You can choose to do the same if you want to play along, but don't worry, you can follow the lessons without retuning your guitar.

When it comes to aggressive playing, it's crucial to not play with tension. Making sure you stretch and warm-up, before you play, is going to help you avoid hurting yourself.

Your strings, pickups, and tuning all play a huge role in achieving a great metal tone. A lot of players opt to use a hybrid set of strings for playing metal. A hybrid set has thicker low strings and thinner high strings, meaning the low strings will be nice and tight for heavy chugging, and the high strings will be loose enough for bends and lead playing.

Palm muting is a fundamental metal rhythm technique. You're going to need to familiarise yourself with this technique so that you can tighten up all of your riff playing. Be aware of where you place your right hand, and make sure you're getting the correct tone when you palm mute. Joss teaches a tricky riff in this one, so keep coming back to it until you've got it down!

Where would metal riffs be without power chords?! You probably know what these are, but our resident metal-head is here to teach you them just in case!

Pioneered by James Hetfield (Metallica), among many other fantastic players, down-picking is a tricky technique to get up to speed. You might think you can just alternate pick all of your riffs, but down-picking changes the sound and aggression of your riffs.

Single note riffs are a great evolution from power chords and give you a platform for adding embellishments and variation to your playing. They're useful for adding more harmonic texture to your riffs, but also open the doors to playing faster, more complex parts.

Galloping is a picking technique that gives the feeling of momentum, and sounds somewhat like a horse galloping... into battle, of course! It's a tricky one to get tight, but it's a great way of adding rhythmic variation and excitement to your riffs.

Vibrato is very common in a lead context, but with wide bends and pinched harmonics being so synonymous with metal rhythm playing, nailing good, wide vibrato is a must! Vibrato is something you just have to keep practising and paying attention to, and having great-sounding vibrato is something that will always make your playing stand out.

You can't think for long about pinched harmonics in a metal setting without thinking about Zakk Wylde (Black Label Society / Ozzy Osborne). If there was ever a time to go all-in with pinches, it's now! Embrace your inner Pride & Glory and throw them in wherever you can! It's a tricky technique to learn, but once you've got it, you won't be able to stop.

Sliding in and out of power chords, or throughout your riffs, is a great way to embellish your rhythm playing. Sliding can make a massive change to the sound & dynamics of your riffs. Joss uses Mastodon's "Blood & Thunder" as an example of this fundamental technique.

As a metal rhythm player, besides pulling incredible faces, your most important job is to stay tight! Developing your timing & your internal clock is key to sounding great as a rhythm player, and it is something you should pay a lot of attention to.

There are thousands of ways to get a great metal tone, and every aspect of tone production is subjective. But with years of experience working in music retail, Joss shares his unbiased opinion on how you should approach getting new gear if you are looking to purchase something to improve or develop your metal tone.

If we didn't make this lesson, people would've asked for it! Joss is here for a quick lesson on how to play fast.

Here we are at the end of the Metal Rhythm Guitar course! In this lesson Joss breaks down one of his own tracks, "He Whom The Gods Detest", which has an apt name for the brutality within! The song covers all the techniques covered in the course, and Joss breaks it down section by section. Enjoy the breakdown!

Enjoy a full playthrough of He Whom the Gods Detest for you to come back over time and shred over!

We brought Joss back to Musicisum to shoot some more awesome metal guitar content for you!

Enjoy a full playthrough of He Whom the Gods Detest for you to come back over time and shred over!

Enjoy this full performance of a brand new track from Joss, exclusively written for this course!

We had a load of questions from our students for Joss, so we compiled them all together into one big Q&A video!