I am having alot of difficulty doing clean pull offs from the D chord shape without muting…
For example pulling off the F# to an open E string and pulling off a G to an F#
I have not been able to find any videos teaching these techniques…any assistance would be greatly appreciated!
Practice, practice practice, and it will happen! Sound familiar?? Lol. It’s said alot around these here parts!
Make sure you are hitting the chord properly. If it is muting when pulling off, one of your other fingers is not placed right and muting it. If your new at the D chord it is most certainly incorrect finger placement. I would be opt to practice D chord until you can almost always hit it perfectly before trying pull off or hammer ons.
Practice your D chord perfectly…Making sure each individual string is singing out clearly, once this is ok, try a pull off. Doesn’t work? Relax, shake the hand out a bit. Refind your D chord. Rinse and repeat. Only practice will get you there.
Darren
Welcome to the forum Chuck. I think your look for a lesson on palm muting. This one is for basic palm muting for power chords but the technique is the some for muting pulloffs
Hi @crc0952, I have recently had to learn exactly the same move: pull-off from fret 2 of the high e string while holding down a D chord. I had a lot of trouble at first, whenever I pulled off the string, my 3rd finger (fretting the D note on the B string) would move slightly, touching the e string and muting the pull-off. I spent a fair amount of time over the course of about a week trying small adjustments to my finger positions and I was finally able to get it. Here are a couple things that helped:
Make sure the fingers where they touch the fretboard are perpendicular (very perpendicular) to the fretboard. Any slight inclination (of finger 3) will mute the pulled-off note.
Minimize as much as possible the pull-off movement of finger 2. I found that if I made the pull-off gesture as small as possible, I could avoid the muting effect. A big movement in finger 2 made finger 3 move as well, causing the muting. The pulled-off note will sound not very loud, but once you get it to ring out, you will be able to gradually increase the volume with practice.
I also adjusted slightly where I placed finger number 2 with respect to the e string. To get the pull-off working, I placed that finger slightly lower (towards the floor) on the fretboard than I normally would holding a D chord. In other words, so the e string passed close to the nail on finger 2. This helped with minimizing the pull-off gesture that I mentioned above.
I’m not sure if these ideas will help, your trouble might be different from what I was experiencing.
One last comment: I have found that pull-offs (and hammer-ons) tend to improve with playing. For a while, even after doing the things I listed above, my pull-offs were not very consistent, but after practicing the song many, many times, the pull-off improved to the point where it always sounds out clean now.
I really appreciate your taking the time to provide such a thorough explanation…