Anyone else on here find it impossible to keep their middle finger away from the strings when picking?

Playing Technique
#1

When using a pick it’s quite important to keep your other fingers from touching the strings. They can they create additional unwanted noise, and also get in the way (such as getting hooked into the string). I understand that the solution to this is “well, just lift your fingers away from the strings”, which seems pretty logical. But, while I can do this, I cannot do it without tension. I don’t know if it’s just that my middle finger is over 1cm longer than my index finger (if I lay my hand flat, at least) or what but I’ve always had tension if trying to keep it away from the strings and I think that’s what gets in the way of my picking a lot.

I’m wondering if anyone else has this issue. As far as I see it, I have 3 options:

  1. Fan out my fingers. It kinda works but I feel like it slows me down
  2. Rest my fingers on the body of the guitar. This can work fairly well until I get to the lower strings, at which point picking just feels “weird”
  3. Let my middle finger scrape the strings (I can do this without it hooking if I just tuck it in a bit)

3 actually feels the most natural but it creates this annoying string noise if there’s a lot of distortion. Also… this is a problem no matter how I hold the pick. The only way completely around it for me is to expose more of the pick and hold the pick much higher up, but it’s so much higher up that it presents other problems for me like inaccuracy and instability.

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#2

There’s possibly a fourth option: have you ever noticed how petrucci puts the middle finger more or less on top of the index when he goes into shred mode?

You can spot several instances of this in the rock discipline intro solo:

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#3

Hey here’s an even better one - does anyone else find that after struggling with something for ages then finally deciding to post about it, they figure out exactly what the issue is shortly after?

So I figured it out. Turns out it’s nothing to do with the way I hold the pick but the motion I actually use when I pick. It seems that I picked up quite the rotational motion with my picking when trying to learn DWPS and probably over compensated for my inability to do it by angling too much. Looking at people that do rotational motion with DWPS - including Troy when he fancies playing that way (because at this point it’s as if he can basically do all of the different picking styles), they do tend to have their fingers resting on or flopping against the body of the guitar.

I looked at it again and again and realised, hey, my picking is fairly rotatey. I’ve tried to fix that before but never could, but it turns out it was pretty much because of the supination I was using (despite watching plenty of Troy videos and fully understanding the concept I somehow missed this in my own playing). So I thought “hey, let’s try and get upstroke escapes but with a much flatter picking curve while supinating a lot less” and put a lot of conscious effort into it and… lo and behold! The unnecessary rotation is gone, my middle finger whacks into the strings much less frequently and everything just feels more precise.

…actually I’m not 100% sure if it was just rotation or something else. I’ve noticed that, especially if trying to DSX, a lot of my picking motion is more of a flexion/extension than deviation which causes me to hook into the strings more but also bash my middle finger into the strings. I could never quite get rid of that from my picking motion and it meant I always struggled to grasp how people could play with mostly deviation and also keep their other fingers off the strings, but forcing myself to play flatter seems to have fixed that. Now to just actually train it into how I play and not slip back to old habits…

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#4

@tommo Yeah I had noticed that before and used to try it quite a bit but it never quite worked for me. It’s a good suggestion and in most cases would probably have worked but… while I didn’t feel my supination was particularly extreme, I think the way I was picking was causing this problem no matter what and it even happened when trying exactly what you’re showing above.

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