Pressing the hand down intensively makes heavy muting, enhancing staccato effect, adding percussion and making notes less recognizable. Slight touch makes light muting, thus producing more pronounced, fuller sounds. Amount of applied pressure tends to vary the sound a lot. There are many ways to perform palm muting, but, generally the following are recognized: The strings may be plucked with the thumb, or with a pick which gives a more percussive tone. Palm-muting is also used by electric bassists in order to obtain a warm, 'thumpy' tone that is sometimes similar to that of a double bass. Palm muting can also be used in conjunction with a wah pedal to produce the distinctive scratching sound often heard in disco music. It is responsible for the characteristic 'chugging' sound of distorted guitar music. Palm muting is so widely used as to be idiomatic in punk rock, heavy metal, and particularly thrash, speed and death metal, but it is often found in any style of music that features electric guitars with distortion in the signal's preamplification stage. While rare in classical guitar technique, palm muting is now a standard technique among electric guitarists who play with a pick. The name is a slight misnomer, as the muting is usually performed by the side or heel of the hand. Palm mutes are executed by placing the side of the picking hand below the little finger across all of the strings very close to the bridge and then plucking the strings with the fingers while the damping is in effect. This technique is known as pizzicato by classical guitar players (see classical guitar techniques for details). The palm mute is a playing technique for the guitar or bass.

Palm muting in trilian bass