Question about hand position and muting

djadam

The short of it is that the pinky-side of my right palm is addicted to the bridge of the guitar in order to mute the strings. For example, on any guitar I've ever played if I hit an A on the 5th fret of the high E string, there's a significant A overtone resonating on the A and D strings. Instinctively, my right hand moves in to mute them and now I'm out of position.

I've been studying Stochelo's videos in particular because I dig his tone. He'll hit that same high A and his left hand will be nowhere near the lower strings and his right hand appears to stay away from the bridge for the most part. In the Samois video, he plays with a relatively flatter wrist, so it's harder to tell, but in the video with Romane he has more angle to his wrist so you can see that he's not using it for muting.

Some of the stuff I'm muting comes from sloppy style and could be avoided with better technique, but some of it comes from sympathetic vibrations on strings which aren't touched.

Can anyone help me understand why the gypsy pickers don't seem to be doing much active muting, yet I rarely hear these overtones which are so pronounced on my acoustic instruments?

MichaelHorowitz

For the most part I don't think muting is really desired...if you have a good guitar the overtones will sound good and add to the sound. Unfortunately a lot of inferior instruments produce a wash of annoying harmonics with every note you play. I suppose you could try and mute those but it's probably a fruitless endeavor. Would probably be easier to just get a better guitar.

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Tele295

You may also want to work on developing your left hand muting technique to keep unwanted strings (such as the D string in your example) from ringing out.

BluesBop Harry

One other thing is that if you use rest strokes you automatically end up stopping the next string.
Say you were to play that A on the sixth string fifth fret with a rest stroke the open A string wouldn't ring because the pick is resting against it.

dennis

as michael said, when playing an acoustic instrument, a certain level of overtones is desirable! The rest comes with proper use of the left hand and precise attack of the right hand

djadam

Thanks to all for your input. I might have confused things by saying overtone where I meant harmonic. There's some overlap in their definitions, but in this case I'm referring to the much stronger sympathetic harmonics caused by hitting a note which corresponds to an open string.

I don't have a traditional gypsy guitar, so maybe you can tell me about yours... if you play a perfect rest-stroke on the 5th fret of the high E string and then immediately mute it, do your A and D strings not continue to ring a significant sympathetic harmonic? Sometimes letting it ring is cool, but sometimes I want to mute it and that's where the right-hand muting instinct comes in after years of alternate picking.

It's probably not very distracting in a band-context, but it's pretty noticeable when I play in silence. Maybe I have to get out more...