Do you anchor or tuck away your fingers on your picking hand?

I just thought about this - do you anchor some fingers against your guitar’s body or keep them tucked away when you’re playing?

I loosely rest the 3 fingers not holding the pick, maybe going to a full float with dangling fingers for tremolo picking type stuff.

Cannot do floating hand with the fingers curled in, feels like trying to walk without touching the ground.

I’m beginning to think that, because I float my hand, this is holding me back because it’s a little unstable. I’m going to try and anchor.

Anchor. If I float my hand, I can’t play on the high E for shit.

Generally it’s just my middle and ring fingers on the body of the guitar, pinky held back so I don’t hit the volume knob (RG7620). I don’t have very big hands, so when playing on the lower strings I tend to just let the edge of my hand be the anchor. This works fine because, again, rest strokes.

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After many many years playing rock on a thin solid-body electric, my default mechanic has been anchoring the palm, with a slight bias towards the thumb side of the hand. This has resulted in an UWPS biased approach using wrist deviation that has worked well enough for me for 30+ years.

I had to revisit this when a few years ago when I bought my first arch-top for jazz. With the high violin-style floating bridge my old anchoring mechanic wasn’t going to work very well. The bridge was just too high and too thin. Not only was I choking off the tone of the strings, but the “cut” of the bridge into my picking hand was very uncomfortable.

I realized that much of this had to do with an obsession I had when I was younger of getting the strings muted properly with a high-gain amp. But in jazz, where you aren’t constantly trying to corral every note, there’s less need for it (though feedback can still be a problem). So I’ve slowly started developing a picking-hand that anchors closer to the elbow. My picking motion is still primarily wrist-based but relies less on having that pivot point on the picking hand.

Of course when I go back to a regular solid-body, that all goes out the window and I return to my original technique. Frankly, I think this is okay. These are really two very different instruments requiring different approaches and explains why you don’t see a lot of players that can absolutely tear it up on both.

FWIW I think acoustic guitars are in many ways a lot closer to solid-body electrics for this same reason. The relation of the strings to the bridge and the body are more like each than either is to an arch-top. I would venture to guess this explains why we observe more primarily-electric players that are equally facile with an acoustic, but don’t see a lot that switch between solid-body electric and an arch-top.

Whew. Long answer to a short question.

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Thanks for the replies guys. I just made the title and question clearer. I guess that we are all muting, so what I meant was - do you anchor your fingers against the body or keep them tucked away :slight_smile:

My goal is to keep my hand and arm as relaxed as possible. I don’t try to do anything, and any person I’ve ever taught I’ve told the same thing. Number one rule is to be relaxed, and usually that doesn’t involve contorting the hand or fingers, so my fingers are as they normally are when I am walking around.

Most of the time I anchor everything that can be anchored. I would even anchor the pick if didn’t have to use it :wink:

More seriously, I find it useful to know where the strings are and to control the size of the picking motion.

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Depends on what I’m playing.

Sometimes my pinky is anchoring, sometimes the fingers are pointing outwards. I don’t think I ever tuck everything in like I’m making a fist though.

I can do my jiggle picking better without the pinky anchor. Some stuff I find to be more accurate with the pinky anchor. Again, just depends on what I’m doing. If i’m practicing something, I’ll try with and without an anchor and see what feels better.

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For forearm-rotation dwps, my main technique, it’s a sliding ring finger on the pickguard. For Batio style 2wps (mostly uwps) a sometimes-fixed-sometimes-sliding tip of the middle finger on the pickguard. More conventional looking 2wps (mostly up): ring finger pretty much anchored and sometimes even curling under the high E string. Crosspicking, sucks, but best results have come with a ring finger anchor similar to my “conventional” 2wps. I’ve tried to get the Carl Miner pinky anchor thing going, but I haven’t found a solution for it that seems to work well with my physiology.

I find my self anchoring using my pinky when doing UWPS, but barely touching the guitar’s body when doing DWPS (but resting on the bridge).

Lately I have been experimenting without anchoring and I didn’t lose precision at all, which was surprising for me. I have the feeling that without anchoring, I can control my pick-slanting and edge-picking angles much better.

I will keep experimenting with it for a while until it feels “normal” and then see if made some gains.

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I’ve been dicking around with both lately. I used to be a tucker but I find that my hand gets more tense. I’m aiming for the most relaxed, dynamic and easy to move position possible so I’ve been trying to aim for a loose fist. I still anchor pinky when playing acoustic though.

Sometimes my fingers splay out like George Lynch, but I caught on film that when I get down to faster/more technical stuff, I not only anchor, but my pinky tends to find and slightly curl around my bridge pickup mount. I never would have caught that without footage. (Palm rests lightly on bridge).
Might have something to do with the weird way I hold my pick as well. (With index and middle finger)… I think this came from my early years of VH tapping, so I could easily switch between tapping and picking without dropping the pick or retrieving it in an awkward angle.

So I know this is a really old topic but this is something which I have only really started to pay attention to recently.

I found that I seemed to struggle more picking the string as I moved towards the high e. And I couldn’t for the life of me work out why so I decided to film myself to see what was going on.
I found that I was anchoring the palm of my hand on the bridge which was causing me to use my wrist for moving between strings rather than my elbow or shoulder. This meant that when I got to the high e string I was hitting the strings with an angle that was sometimes almost parallel to the string.
I am now trying move the palm of hand away from the strings to free it up for my elbow to do some work while switching strings but for now this is feeling really weird.
For some reason the moment I anchor my hand on the bridge it just refuses to move.

I don’t anchor my palm like that, but I do curl my pinky around my bridge pickup ring a bit for a reference point, as opposed to a full float.

My experience in Tucking vs anchoring. Tbh it’s still an on going battle in my mind, but if I had to perform, the basic bridge anchor n tuck just works.

I used to always have my fingers anchored but after a while I found that it was really restricting how fast I could play. Once I changed to not having any part of my arm bar the elbow touching the guitar with my fingers tucked in I was able to play a lot faster.