If you want to play heavy metal, then very often you just want the heaviest sound you can get right? However, the problem that many new heavy metal guitar players have is that the more they try to make the guitar sound heavier the worse the guitar sounds. Without realizing it, most heavy metal guitarists tweak the guitar effects to the extent that what they do actually have adverse effects.

This guitar article is written in mind to point out some of the most common mistakes that heavy guitar players make. In doing so, I hope that after reading this, you would go back and do your own tweaks to your heavy metal playing.

The first most common mistake that many guitarists make is that they will turn the guitar distortion on the effects all the way up to MAX. This does not merely apply to guitar players as I see this problem recurring everywhere even in guitarists playing rock guitar.

Now, for some styles of metal, like Death Metal, you may want to do this, but for mid to heavy metal, the problem with having the distortion on full is that you will lose a lot of the attack. A cool sounding riff or metal rhythm progression will actually lose all the edge and sound monotonous.

You may wonder why the picking attack is crucial in metal guitar playing. The attack is important because it creates definition when you are playing fast riffs or playing crunchy chords. Having a very high distortion from the pedals will make the notes blend too much into each other resulting in a very muddled sound.

What you should do is to try easing back on the distortion until you can hear the initial attack of the strings. You'll often achieve this by easing the guitar distortion back to around the 75% mark. Go play around with your effects pedal and hear for yourself what a great difference this would make in your guitar sound.

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