Dimebag Darrell Style Harmonics

The late great Dimebag Darrell had many signature elements about his playing style that catapulted him to the top of the metal guitar world in the early nineties.

Probably the most notable technique in his bag of tricks was the insane harmonic screams that he could conjure out of his guitar. We had heard harmonics and dive bombs and all that before in rock and metal, but nothing like this.

In this video lesson I will demonstrate how to play Dimebag Darrell style harmonics just like the man himself did.

First off, you need a lot of gain. A strong humbucking bridge pickup and a ton of gain are essential to getting the huge harmonic screams out of your guitar like Dimebag did.

In the video lesson I demonstrate the 3 steps of achieving that kind of effect. It can be a little bit tricky at first, but once your hands get acclimated to the technique, you can then experiment with playing harmonics that are little more difficult to hit. Those more difficult harmonics can usually be found at points just before or after frets between the 1st and 3rd frets on the G string, and it will take some experimentation to find ones that you can use.

Dimebag definitely had the right kind of touch for this technique. The touch that is required is rather light and also very accurate over specific harmonic node points. However, with a little bit of practice you can make this technique almost second nature kind of like pinch harmonics are after a while of playing.

Hopefully you will have a floating trem system that is set up correctly and stays in tune well. The fact that you have to depress the bar down until the strings are pretty slack puts a huge demand on your trem system. So make sure yours is working correctly before starting to practice this technique because otherwise, you will go out of tune almost immediately.

In any case, any study of Dimebag Darrell's playing is simply an effort to demonstrate a little bit of what made this extremely passionate and dedicated metal guitarist tick. There will never be another one like him and the guitar world was dealt a HUGE blow with his untimely death. Hopefully this lesson will help keep his spirit alive in some small way for future generations of guitarists.

Carl..

If these free lessons help you, please donate to keep new ones coming daily. Thanks!! 🙂

Dimebag Darrell Style Harmonics