"Chucking" is a funk guitar technique in which the player plays chords or individual notes with the strings muted or even completely deadened. Muting the strings isn't much of a problem, but because chucking essentially turns the guitar into a rhythm instrument, your timing becomes everything. It's a good idea to practice with a metronome to make sure your chucking rhythm is working with your drummer and not against him.
Practice chucking a note by touching a string with a finger of your left hand, just enough to deaden the sound, and picking the string rhythmically with a pick in your right hand. Press slightly harder to get a muted, but not fully resonant, sound out of the string. Practice playing lead lines using both a deadening and muting pressure.
Practice chucking a chord by playing the chord with just enough pressure to mute the strings and strumming just the muted strings in a rhythmic pattern. This technique works best with barre chords, where you are fingering all the strings on the guitar.
Practice alternating fully voiced notes with chucked notes. For instance, play a fully voiced half note, followed by two chucked quarter notes. Or try a fully voiced chord with a half note and then chuck the chord with eight fast 16th notes. You'll instantly recognize the classic funk sound.
Practice with a metronome as you speed up your chucking patterns to make sure you're staying precisely on rhythm.
A chucking guitar is frequently played through a wah pedal, so that the fully voiced notes or chords can be distorted as they're played. In a solo, the fully voiced notes can be bent to create the distortion.
Chucking is an electric guitar technique; deadened or muted notes can rarely be heard on an unamplified guitar.