Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for musicians, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Currently working on learning Secret Base (arr. by sungha jung) and the tabs have a P over the chord. I dont know if this means palm mute or what because its not a pull-off.
Also unrelated im not sure the proper way to play ghost notes if anyone can help me
https://imgur.com/gallery/TYBmrPA <-- This is the tab im reffering to.
If anyone else has any other tips on playing this song I would really appreciate it.
In Guitar Pro (a common tablature reading/writing software), you can achieve this P symbol by selecting the note/chord and selecting the pop option in the editor:
If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that the tab author probably wants to indicate that at this point you need to lightly slap the lower (or lowest) string with your thumb as you play. This is a very common acoustic guitar technique and when you listen to this song, you will likely hear a light "slap" sound at this point as Sungha Jung lightly slaps the lowest string with his thumb here.
In fact, listening to the song on YouTube, he starts doing this around 30 seconds in.
An alternative interpretation could be that it is indicating where the percussive thumps go (which start around a minute and a half in), but it depends where in the song your tab is from.
Either way, I believe this to be a percussive marking rather than a dynamic or fingering one as others have suggested.
It could mean palm muting, if you have a video it is easy to verify, but most of the time it means quieter (piano). Double "pp" means even quieter (pianissimo). Mind you, that is kind of what a palm muting does so you won't be far off except it will sound very compressed as well.
Regarding ghost notes (crosses on the TABs) you just play them by lifting your finger so that it does not touch the fret board, just resting lightly on the string.
If you know how to do harmonics, this is basically doing the same except your finger is not somewhere on the string where you can hear harmonics. If you rest your finger right in the middle of the string (fret 12) then you will hear harmonics instead of a ghost note.
It generally happens incidentally in 2 cases. One is when you strum a chord but you want to ignore a string in between 2 strings. You have no choice but to rest your finger on this string so that we don't hear the open string.
The other case is when sometimes when changing chords people play the open strings while moving to the next chords to avoid a blank. But when the open string notes are not in the key they are playing in, it can sound disgraceful. Then in this case they might rest their fingers so that we hear ghost notes instead.
And then obviously ghost notes can also be stylistic like the ones in "Smells like teen spirit" main riff.
