Thanks for posting! This all looks pretty good. Short answer, I had the same problem as you, and for years I could never understand how players like DiMeola and Gilbert could play as they do without their fingers hitting the strings. Every time I tried it, my knuckles got scraped up badly and even broke the skin in one instance. There’s a moment in one of the Andy Wood interviews where we talk about that.
Well, it turns out the source of the confusion was pretty simple. Those players don’t play like that! They play like this:
Or some slight variation on this. In other words, they don’t curl all the way under so that their knuckles come near the strings. The fingers are only gently curled. Here’s Andy Wood’s version:
Andy undercurls a little more than this on occasion, and he also undercurls less, with more outstretched fingers. But he never goes under so far that the knuckles are right down there against the strings, to where the last joint of the finger is parallel to the strings. That’s a recipe for scraping. Instead, there’s always a little angle to the last joint of the finger so finger tip is closer to the strings than the knuckles.
When you do this correctly, you won’t feel any conscious strain or lifting of the fingers. It feels roughly similar to resting your hand on a desk and curling your fingers ever so gently. You may need to tool around with this to find that point of minimal effort, but it’s there. I didn’t even use this grip until a couple years ago, but after some experimentation I was like oh, ok, there it is.