Right Hand Positioning, annyoing :/ Options

[fire]

hey guys

as my hand positioning is difficult to explained, i made a picture:


well, clearly to see: the yellow painting is where the hand should be (and i thought i hold mine, too, actually:-P)
now to the problem: the red arrows show where my hand is while playing: its on the bridgepickup holder, and i kind of "roll" it up to the Estring, when playing on higher strings.. well this worked (and still works) quite good for me, but i have 2 problems:

a) it seems just wrong to me like a bad habit or kind of

it prevents me from palm muting when coming from a fast run down, because when i want to mute, i have to lift my hand up and place it in the "correct" way.

now i also tried to solve this by placing my hand "correctly" but now i have big problemes with

a)noises and

B)artificial harmonics (my hand is way to close to the bridge, have to lift my hand to get to some IMO "imortant" harmonic spots, and because,

c) if you pick closer to the bridge, the tension of the strings is higher, which leads in a higher string resistance that feels uncomfortable and makes me play slower...

so would you recommend me to change my picking style and go for the "correct" way?
(keep in mind that i want to buy another guitar pretty soon, and im 99% sure it wont have this kind of "big" pickup holder...

cheers

[jacmoe]

I think you need to train your hand for a while.

If you can manage to play with your picking hand not anchored at all, albeit slowly, you are slowly breaking your habit.

Try using your pinky as an anchor as well.

Yes, I definately recommend that you get rid of that habit at once!

[Ivan Milenkovic]

It's not the pickup frame fault mate, and I'm not quite sure it is yours fault as well. Perhaps you just need to be more focused during practice on your right hand muting techniques? I actually mute the strings closer to where the red arrows are and don't have any problems. The trick is to polish down your "rolling" with palm so you execute it in fluid motion, depending what strings you pick. For example the more you go to high strings, to more your palm starts to "roll over" the bass strings.

[kaznie_NL]

I have a little question about the same thing. Do I need to put my hand where the yellow is? I tend to have my hand around the middle pickup! When just picking or playing chords, not when palm muting of course. Is that wrong? When I have my hand more to the bridge pickup, i don't realy play comfortable, and I get a little pain in my right shoulder. I beleive someone told me, the pain was cause by playing the guitar to high (weird... it's on my right knee) and that my shoulder should be trained in that position. I just need some feedback on the above story Hope you could follow it.

[Ivan Milenkovic]

I think it's good to keep your palm above the strings no matter where you are picking, left, in the middle or right. Muting always has to be performed right? Most of the time we don't pick at the bridge at all, so this kind of palm muting servers good for riffing, because it doesn't mute the string dead, it gives it some space to ring to give that "tail" to our powerchord for example.

[RIP Dime]

If your only real problem with your current right hand positioning is that it's difficult to palm mute, then I'd say to just practice the hell out of palm muting, I'm sure you can get it down without changing much of your current technique.

It doesn't sound like it's a very big problem technically, but it seems to be messing with your mind to the point where you think you're doing it incorrectly, even when it works well for you. I think you just need to tell yourself "If it works for me it's right.", then get practicing again.

This post has been edited by RIP Dime: Aug 22 2008, 07:11 PM