Does anybody have difficulties when switching between different guitars? Like different bridge types and pickup configurations?
Everyone does more or less. Playing Guitar’s a very intricate series of fine movements, your muscles, nervous system, tendons, memories all adapt to the guitars construction, altering even the slightest things can throw your movements off by enough to make you seem like a beginner. Till you adapt to that new guitar of course.
YES. At home I practice with a Stratocaster only. At Band rehearsal I use a Les Paul and it feels like playing on a garden fence. My picking technique falls apart usually and I need several hours to adapt to the guitar - if at all! Is this normal?
on Strat: My arm just lies on the body supinated and picking works fine
on Les Paul: My arm is… a mess and cramped with fingers clawing the bridge-pickup-frame
A weird guitar world… Gibson SG works better!
For me it generally takes a few minutes, but I am working on keeping as close to the same arm position as I can when going between guitars. Strats and Les Pauls feel very different to me anyway so it’s no surprise that gives you trouble. I would say find a way to practice on both or remember how you have your arm positioned on one of them and try to replicate that on the other. Maybe try the les Paul position on the strat. I hope that makes some sense. That’s what I did to get used to playing a Floyd Rose equipped guitar. I would just pretend all my guitars had one so I would avoid playing too far back which on a Floyd caused me to bump the fine tuners and push the guitar slightly out of tune. Hope that helps in some way.
The main thing that gets me is the volume knob placement on a standard strat. Most of the guitars I play (particularly my main one) have Charvel-style knob placement.
Same. It took me a long time to get used to the volume knob on both my strat and my Ibanez. Kept turning down the volume.
I definitely feel differences, but particularly with one-way pickslanting I feel I can adapt reasonably fast. Unless we are talking weird jazz guitars where the strings are 1 meter above the pickguard (I found one like this in a shop).
With two-way pickslanting it gets a bit trickier to adapt, as I feel the movements need to be more precise.
I use two RG550s but one is 9-46 in standard and the other is 12-60 in B standard that I use for my band. I try to practice on both and I think it’s beneficial to get a bit of that confusion going on by playing both in the same practice session. Particularly for my vibrato.
I do remember one time I tried playing a students guitar that was a Schecter with the carved top and tuneomatic bridge and it felt really wonky because all my contact points for my right hand were off. But I assume if I practiced on it I could get it to feel comfortable.