Exercises to speed up power chord strumming

Question

I've been learning for a while, and can play power chord songs with simple rhythms (like Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Polly, etc). However, most interesting rock songs seem to have a complicated mixture of full on strumming and palm muting. Playing this at slow speeds is fine, but at fast speeds, at which the song has usually been recorded, trying to palm mute at the right places becomes tricky.

An example of such a song is Basket Case. Each chord is played for 2 bars (8 beats), some of them have full strums at 1st and 7th beats, some at 1st and 6th, and doing this at fast speeds seems almost impossible. Would it be rather better to just play along and palm mute at random places, at your own judgement, or continue to speed up this "precise" palm muting?

Answer 1

You can definitely start slow, but go for precision here- these will not be difficult to play once you become a bit more proficient.

There are some really fast songs with intermittent palm muting from bands like Al di Meola, Dragonforce and Yngwie Malmsteen - have a listen to them to see what is possible with practice.