Mouth For War Guitar Lesson – Pantera


In this Mouth For War guitar lesson video, I will show you how to play all of the incomparable Dimebag Darrell's amazing guitar work on this killer Pantera track off of their Vulgar Display Of Power album.

As I mention in the video lesson, this song uses what Dimebag referred to as "Pantera tuning". Dimebag liked to tune his guitar down a little over a guitar step from whatever tuning he was using. In this case, you can call it standard tuning that is tuned down an additional quarter step or so. His longtime guitar tech explained it better by saying you can tune your guitar down a half-step, which would be Eb tuning, then raise the tuning back up 40 cents. If you do that, you will match the tuning on the original Mouth For War recording.

Dimebag comes right out of the gate with a rapid-fire riff that is also the song's pre-chorus. From there he launches into the main riff of the song which incoporates power chord slides. The power chord slide riff is also the chorus riff.

After this, he comes out with a very cool power chord riff that is a mixture of sliding power chords, muted low E hits and harmonics. Those harmonics can be a bit tricky to get perfect.

After demonstrating these riffs, I will show you how to play the rhythm guitar work under the guitar solo, the bridge section which is basically just a beefed up version of the riff under the solo, and cap off the rhythm section of this tutorial with a look at the fast outro section.

Then I will platy through Dimebag's amazing guitar solo and show you how to play it note-for-note.

This solo contains lots of HUGE bends and a very fast alternate picked lick that is based around a picking pattern that Dimebag incorporated a lot into his solos.

I hope you guys enjoy learning this metal guitar masterpiece!

Carl...

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Mouth For War Guitar Lesson - Pantera

7 Comments

  1. Brandon Weatherford on May 15, 2019 at 6:41 am

    Carl, when playing the rhythm are you palm muting at all, or are you just letting the strings ring out?

  2. Brandon Weatherford on May 15, 2019 at 7:54 am

    The third one in the lesson.

    • Carl Brown on May 15, 2019 at 8:26 am

      Can you give the me the exact minute and second mark in the video where I start teaching that? I don’t want to give you the wrong info. 🙂

  3. Brandon Weatherford on May 15, 2019 at 8:46 am

    It starts at the 6:54 mark. Thank you for getting back to me, Carl!!

    • Carl Brown on May 17, 2019 at 12:59 pm

      For that riff you mute anytime you are playing the low E open string but you leave all the power chords that are sliding around unmuted.

  4. Oswald on June 14, 2021 at 5:23 pm

    what would be the value of A4 for Dimebag in this song? is it 425 hz ? or 450hz? thanks keep on rocking !!!

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