Elio
Student Of The Blues
Thank you. Bad analogy)) I was born driving a stick shift)) . I just have to practice until I get the right formula, I guess.
One thing that I worked on last night is not bending the string with the end of my finger but rather with the fleshy part not quite opposite my nail. I was kind of observing what was happening and when I bend with the end of my finger the B and G string sort of fold over each other and when they release that is when the ringing is caused. If I bend with the fleshy part then part of my finger is over the top of the B and G string and controls them better. It requires more strength and control and it ain't perfect but I may be on to something. Thanks so much for responding, I am new to this and am amazed at the complexity of playing the electric guitar. I haven't yet begun to deal with the amplifier and that is a whole other instrument to learn))
My method for controlling string noise was to always pick upward on a bent note so that the pick would rest on the next string and dampen it. My instructor, as well as a another close friend who is a music professor both advised against it. My friend's logic was that it would interrupt my picking. His advise was to work entirely on hitting the target pitch and that the string noise issue would resolve itself.
The technique that my local instructor taught me was one that works well but that was incredibly awkward for me. That was to use the top finger not to bend but to stick out a little bit to touch and mute the adjacent string. For example, if your ring finger and pinky are doing the bending, the middle finger is used to dampen the next string. At the time that I was trying to learn to bend properly, I could just never really do that comfortably and kept resisting so I never really adopted it. At some point, everything came together and I just stopped thinking about bends as they just all started to work without the noise.
A few months ago it occurred to me that my instructor's technique is exactly what I do now fairly consistently and without ever thinking about it. Even so, I still use the palm of my picking hand to mute strings, as well. It turns out that they were both right. My instructor's method works great and by not over-thinking it and by focusing on the pitch the problem resolved itself.