When playing guitar, how you mute the string is just as important as how you strike it and the best guitarists are experts at muting their strings.

A muted string is rarely entirely quiet and as it happens, some of the hardest hitting rock is played by guitarists who've mastered the mute.

Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host Kirk Hamilton and I'm so glad that you joined me for another year of palm muting, finger muting, and wide open, beautifully vibrating guitar strings.

Strong Songs is a listener supported show. You probably know that already. That means that you all make it possible for me to keep working on this show and making it.

If you want to support the creation of Strong Songs, there's a PayPal link for donations in the show notes. You can also become a patron at patreon.com slash Strong Songs.

On this episode, we're kicking off Strong Songs Year 4 with a bang, taking on the hardest hitting rock tune I've yet covered on the show.

It's time to kick up the gain, kick up the intensity, and drop our tuning down a step. So leap off the mountain and enter the pit. Let's do this thing.

The whole notion of musical genres can be frustrating and limiting, or at least I can feel that way about it, even while I acknowledge that it can be useful to have a shorthand when talking about various musical styles.

But when it comes to rock and roll, there's a sort of steady trajectory of hardness that increases. As the gain starts climbing, the instruments get more distorted, and the players get more aggressive.

You can think of it like a map. Like one of those hand drawn maps you might find in the opening pages of a fantasy novel. There's the mellow meadows, then a thicker forest, then steep foothills, and finally, moving over at all, hard mountain.

Leading through that realm as a path, and the path leaves ever upward, as the music grows heavier and heavier, as the altitude climbs.

So let's take a stroll down that path toward hard mountain, shall we? The path starts in the mellow meadows of pop and folk, where the guitars are acoustic, where music can have a nice bounce and a lot of momentum, but it's more delicate. It doesn't really hit you in the face.

And that's a nice place to hang out there in the mellow meadows, but maybe you decide you want to keep moving down that path toward the mountain, maybe you want to make things just a bit harder.

Maybe you had a little bit of crunch to one of the guitars. Just dial up the gain a little bit, and before you know it, you've moved out of the realm of folk and pop, and into the forest of rock and roll.

Well, now you're entering the foothills and things have certainly gotten harder. There's grit on the guitars, there's a pulse behind the groove that wasn't there before, a bit of stomp, a bit of swagger, a bit of rock.

But you know, maybe that's not enough. Maybe you want to stay on that path, maybe you want to climb the mountain, maybe you want to tune things down a step, maybe you want to increase the gain.

You're on hard mountain now, my friend.

The guitars are so distorted, they're almost unrecognizable. The whole band hitting so hard, they're maxing out the meter with every downbeat.

And it's here, looking out over the kingdom of music, that I think we're gonna stay.

Here at the top of Hard Mountain, we hear a sound so deep, it's practically prehistoric.

Drop your tuning and crank your amps because it's time to talk about plastic.

I hope you're ready to rock.

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