I some times place other fingers higher to mute unwanted noise in the lower strings. It seems to be common practice.
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Was thinking the displaced strings should bend at the fretted note, sorry mobile photo editor.
@jllopez I wish I had my guitar to check this out. I mostly end up right hand muting. Left hand muting under a bend would be beyond me for higher strings I’m thinking.
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Ah yes, I think I know what you mean - it makes sense from a mechanical optimization perspective! Only problem is, I have no idea how to change this 
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Strike that, @jlopez is right. They won’t meet at the first fret, gotta account for action, he’s right about the muting. I just grabbed an old acoustic and looked at it, looks the same as your pics. Think it’s just leveling up overtime. Callous building to be had 
Edit: 40 second mark, no thumb 
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I like the sound of that 
But I think the crucial thing for me is to grab the string in a way that the fingertip is pushed towards the nail, not away from it. I have enough calluses to not feel the “cutting” of the string, but the problem is that the string tension is trying to separate my fingertip from its nail. Very annoying feeling!
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Drop a gauge Tommo, no point fighting it, you are already a very advanced player, just raise the action a bit for even better tone.
Edit: scallops do make easy work of it, but I suspect string gauge will help more, order a set of custom YJM gauge from stringjoy.com, 8-11-14-22-32-46, the 22 is wound when ordering to be sure. The gauge spread is different from most sets. Gotta give it to Malmsteen for figuring this one out.
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But from a biomechanical perspective, the role of the supporting fingers is to distribute the workload of bending the string. If the bent string has only one “bend point” at the fretted note, then the supporting fingers aren’t bearing their share of the pressure.
The theoretically optimal spread of the pressure (in the case of one “fretting” finger plus two supporting fingers) might not involve each finger bearing exactly the same amount of pressure (since they aren’t all equally strong), but it would have each finger bearing at least some of the pressure. That means we would have three bend points that we could think of as the vertices of a triangle.
In order for the middle finger to be bearing any of the pressure, the middle finger vertex has to be offset a non-zero distance (on the “bendward” side) from the edge that joins the index vertex and the ring vertex. If the three vertices form a straight line (or the middle finger is offset in the other direction), then the string is only stretched across the index and ring, and the middle isn’t bearing any of the pressure.
In practice, this may nearly appear to be a straight line, but to the extent that it’s not actually a straight line, we should expect the vertices to outline a triangle that satisfies the condition above.
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Yes, I stand corrected. I made some wrong assumptions.
Bending a string is stretching the metal. I presume that depending on how the string is tuned the “Young’s modulus” will be different, making it harder or easier to bend than one would expect given its thickness. I think that somebody like @tommo could do calculations like this in his sleep. But what is interesting is that the strings break: This might mean a different type of steel might be appropriate, and some of the most interesting strings are from Ernie Ball, where they have maraging steel (“M-Steel”), and whatever it is that they put in their “Paradigm” strings, that are supposedly even harder to break. (There are special machines that break strings, from Instron, but I don’t have one.)
Every brand of strings have their own peculiarlies. American steel is different from European steel (and the choice of metals used are different between the two continents). Two examples are Austria’s Thomastik-Infeld brand (which have brass plated plain strings) versus Bavaria’s Pyramid brand plain strings (where both companies are vastly different feeling/sounding than various American brands‘ plain strings). Also having taller frets and a flatter fingerboard radius plus the scale-length of any instrument you play ALL MATTER GREATLY in what you end up being able to bend. Try different gauges from different string companies until you find what you are looking for. Lastly, scalloped fingerboards make bending easier too.
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And I thought I was the only one dealing with this particular inconvenience haha. I’m practising the tornado of souls guitar solo, I can pretty much nail all the flashy stuff marty does using upwards escape, but I’m really struggling getting his bends right, especially a bend he does in the high E string right after the super fast yngwei-like two string arpeggios.
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Well, Marty is kind of the King of Bends isn’t he
By the way I noticed the other day that, when I can, I tend to use all 4 fingers to bend the high E
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@tommo I used to experience an actual split beneath my nails when doing hard bends, I think it might’ve been due to biting my nails before (which maybe made the skin weaker)? Also changed the pushing angle I think to make the skin less likely to split.
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Little update: I installed some new strings on one of my guitars: 9-42s Ernie Ball XT (or similar).
They stick to the fingers a bit more than my usual Elixirs, so that makes bends a little easier!
PS: I am also trying to always use 4 fingers for bends on the high E - and that seems to help as well.
Where is your thumb when you bend? Do you keep it flat on the back of the neck?
I’m pretty sure every time I bend I have my thumb pressing down on the side of the neck (where the side fret markers are)
I put a couple pics earlier but they got lost in the big thread
Is it just me or it is pretty hard to bend the high E string? - #25 by tommo
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Having a trem, especially a floating trem, makes bends heaps easier. I’ve worked a fair bit on bends so I’m fine now with two tone bends on 10’s on the E string on fixed bridge guitars. But shiiitttt it took a while to get to that. In the beginning I’d resort to using a guitar with a trem because the bridge actually drops pressure a little as you bend. It’s not a massive help but it’s noticeable for sure.
Apologies from bringing up this old thread. I’ve learned a few things since then and one of them is this higher action stuff also contributes to a better pre bend position for a better grip on the string.
But the main thing I’ve learned with my foray into SRV with high action and 13-58 strings had me deal with fatigue head-on.
Without going into every aspect of managing fatigue with all the fretting economies and rest management, I’ll stick to the bending of notes.
The main thing I learned is the push motion is inefficient, I’m now using a twist motion from my wrist while keeping the fretted note and hand stiff, lot more power in the wrist, this means your thumb may need to be placed accordingly to be the fulcrum.
One more thing, closer to the nut, I tend to yank the neck up and down as well along with the twising. Hope this helps somebody.
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Action definitely makes a difference. Two identical guitars with the same string gauge but different action… the one with action that is too low, it will be a ridiculous struggle to bend vibrato on the higher strings, and the one with higher action will be a breeze in comparison. I guess it probably has something to do with helping to get the other strings a bit out of the way.
I play with really light strings for bending vibrato reasons, and also because my hands are prone to being cold, so the less tension I have to put into it, the better. It’s really easy to blow or irritate a tendon/joint when you’re cold.
I’m curious what super light gauge strings do for speed though… I would think as long as they’re not ridiculously floppy it shouldn’t matter too much