How often do you hit the pick guard or pickups with your pick?

Curious. I’m hitting the middle pickup on my strat more frequently and it seems to be happening since I’ve decided to add back more elbow based movement.

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I lower my middle pickup flush with the pickguard both to avoid this, and to avoid having it mess with my ring finger, which I typically allow to glide along the pickguard in my default “Upstroke escaped” forearm-rotationish movement.

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This used to happen to me but I think it was a mental thing. In general it went away the moment I decided to let it happen, but sometimes it occurs. For what it’s worth Paul Gilbert has had the same problem.

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For me never…

The middle pickups (especially when staggered) can really interfere with my picking, it’s almost maddening on some guitars. On my guitars I prefer to replace them with flat ones and screw them in as low as possible.

Another thing that annoys my right hand are those… rectangular barriers around the pickups - pickup rings I think they are called? They tend to be placed exactly where I’d like to rest my unused RH fingers.

Depends. I’ve got an H-S-S Charvel with 2 frets and the middle pickup gets bumped around when I’m on the higher strings, but my 24-fret H-S-S Charvel is no problem.

Got same problem here… lowered the pickup as much as possible on my beloved Strat… but you have to sacrifice some output and tone coming from positions 2 and 4.

To the degree it interferes with me playing? Very rarely if ever. I use Jazz sized picks, though, which may be a factor.