Hanson Brothers

[Loraine]

Lots of practice. Pay particular attention to the curve of your fingers and making sure you’re on your fingertips. Moving your wrist forward helps with this. Also, with the C chord, the low E is not played, so you can move your ring finger higher up (basically muting the low E) and this helps keep it outta the way of the D string.

[Alisa]

I had the same problem. When playing the G chord, my middle finger on the lower E is not muting the A-string when it is pressed down. But when I release the index finger, the A string goes up and it gets muted. Maybe the action is too high, I don’t know. I had to do weird, uncomfortable things to avoid it. I guess the longer your fingers are, the easier it is. Made me a bit grumpy, I have to admit.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by  Alisa.

[Alfred]

Loraine is right, practice and watch the arch of your fingers. Also look at the angle of your wrist. If your wrist is bent too far your palm will drop, and your fingers will sort of straighten out to make the reach, and this can cause issues with muting as well.
Lots of times these issues can come down to posture… back effects shoulder angle, effects elbow angle effects wrist angle effects finger arch and boom string muting.

[JohnV]

Alisa has a good point. If you have a relatively inexpensive guitar or an old one and you are having difficulty fretting notes, it might not be a bad idea to have it set up by a reputable luthier. If the guitar does not need major neck surgery, a good professional set up should improve playability dramatically.

[Fly]

Hi @Solcat I’ve started to overcome this problem recently. I have a cheap entry level guitar and a few months ago came to the conclusion it was my guitar. As for me the muting that occurs is only from a minute touch so I figured if I had more space this would get rid of the problem or if the action was lower again this would give me the fraction of space I need. This could be an easy fix and if you want a new guitar jump in (I’m going to as soon as I decide what I would like) but you may end up spending £££ and still have the same problem and that would be gutting. So in the meantime for me a lot of practice has helped overcome this and I’ve managed to realise what has made the difference is when playing c and g chord I now ( not always sometimes I get tired or sloppy and the muting occurs) slightly push the lower string up a bit and this gives me the room I need to stop muting A String or D string hammer on depending what chord you playing (it’s possible before I realised this I could have been pulling the string a bit so this is what made the muting) . This has really improved my form on playing the chords too so hopefully when I do step up and get that new guitar I’ll be a better player. Hope this helps. Stick with it keep experimenting and you’ll get it