I attempted to make a video of what I've learnt since the 1st January when I enrolled in a 1 video lesson a month with Pebber.

I have been prcticing on my sons strat copy unplugged and thought I was doing okay, however when I plugged it in to the amp and started the right hand exercises, alternating up and down the strings the sustain became too much and I had to damp the strings with my left hand to hear the picked strings clearly. On all the lesson videos this doesn't happen with Pebber and looking at posted videos on the forum the same is true. As I'm totally new to this I really have no idea how to do this, I tied damping the struck string with the side of my right hand but then it deadened the next picked string, particularly when going from high E (string 1) to low E (string 6).

Can someone explain what I am doing wrong, is it how the guitar is set up, the amp or incorrect use of the picking hand?
Cheers in advance.

Paul

Hey Paul,

I think your sitting in front of your amp with your guitar. This can create feedback and i think this is happening to you. What you could do is do not sit in front of your amp but next to it or point the amp to a other direction.

I hope this will help

grtz Ray

Hey Ray,

You may well be right, the amp is in front and slightly to the side. I will move it behind me and see what happens.

Thank you very much

Paul

Paul,

The follwoing happens (if its really feedback).

You hit the string which starts to vibrate and make sound with a certain volume and tone, this vibration is converted by the pickups into an electric signal. The signal flows to your amp and will be amplificated. This amplificated signal goes out of your amp and makes the air vibrate to you can hear it.
When your amp is right in front of you, your strings start to vibrate more because the air there moves a lot due to the amp. Then because the strings vibrate more it will be send with a higher level to the amp again and this amplificates it again which makes the strings even more to vibrate. This goes on untill you place your hand on the strings or goes to a other place.

This is not always unwanted sound, you see sometimes guys playing right in front of their amp that is to create this sound as an effect not to play cool in front of an amp ;)

Has you amp got a reverb or sustain, turn this off and play clean
you need to not use your left hand
start getting your right hand to mute start really slow pebber has a video on youtube about muting i'm sure
maybe post a video of whats happening.

That could be feedback, but it could also just be string noise. Pebber has muting videos where he shows the difference and you'll be able to tell. Basically if you're playing the high strings and it sounds like you're also playing all the low strings open then you're dealing with string noise and you need to learn to mute with your picking hand.

I've played for more than 20 years and I only started to learn about palm muting techniques in the past 2 years or so and I've really only been focusing on it for about 3 months. It makes a huge difference.

Thanks all.

I think it is the palm muting that is needed, I went through the right hand picking exercises last night (unplugged) and I noticed that there was an element of string sound from unpicked strings, which went when I muted them. The problem now is working out how to mute the unpicked strings without muting the picked string, which is what I was doing too much last night.