Sloppiness sloppiness sloppiness!

Hey fellas, I've been getting back into playing heavily as of late, and i don't know if it's just my ears getting better or what, but i can't hardly stand to hear myself play because of my sloppiness. I'm just realizing how cleanly i DON'T play. When I get my amp turned up, it's like every little scrape or bump of a string is coming out and muddying up my playing. Is this normal and i'm just being to picky? I just don't like the excess noise. The worst is when I play with my fingers. It seems like every time I do a pull-off or bend a string, my left-hand fingers are sounding an unwanted string. Releasing bends on the 2nd and 3rd strings always sounds my D string. It's like I'm getting strings caught on my fingers when I bend. What can I do to clean up my playing? Sorry for the rant, but I'm thoroughly frustrated after playing for ten years and realizing just how sloppy it sounds. Thanks for the input,

Jesse

I got back into playing recently and experienced the same things. About the D string sounding on bends, I just worked on bending in super-slow motion. I mean frame by frame. That allowed me to identify what caused the D string to vibrate and how to avoid doing that.

Try to play everything slow and even for a while. I heard that Howard Roberts would spend a few minutes before a gig playing in super-slow motion, concentrating on having the pick and left hand fingers work in tandem. He said when he didn't do that little exercise, his playing would be off all night.

Your hand has turned into a bunch of bananas.

Don't panic. This is normal.

You just need to re-train your muscles. Like an athlete you can over-train. Take a break, say one day in three, to allow hand to recover.

As far as the bending goes, I wonder if my technique is off. I don't know about most people, but when I bend up, the strings I bend in to either go directly into the end of my fingers or slide on top of my finger nail, then when I release the bend they slip back and sound. Maybe it's better to have the strings go under my bending fingers, but my action seems to be to high. I don't know, do you guys use your palm or the fingers of your left hand to dampen unplayed strings?

Don't sweat it, cowboy.
This happens when you haven't played much for awhile...or just haven't played through an amp. When unplugged, you don't hear all that noise.
As long as you know you need to clean it up, you're on the right track. It's no big secret...just find what works for you.
A lot of those little noises will be covered up by the bass player, drummer, etc.
I do often wonder, though, how Jeff Beck, for instance, keeps his guitar cranked up so far and so above the mix, and is so immaculate in terms of not getting all those extra noises.
As for damping strings...yeah...right hand palm, left hand fingers and sometimes thumb wrapped around the top.
As for your noisy D string, bend with the ring and middle, and do a little barre with the index so it will mute the strings you bump into. Or, bend with all 3 fingers and creep that index finger up over the strings you bump into when you release.
You'll figure it out.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v338/charliechitlins/HeapoCrawlerspics010.jpg

When it comes to getting a handle on right and left hand muting and damping, and dealing with extraneous noise in general, I'm a huge fan of dialing up tasteless gobs of super compressed gain and practicing with that. When I started teaching myself to play slide guitar and Travis-picked rhythms, I used a cheesy solid state amp with stupid levels of distortion that had absolutely nothing to do with those styles. Think about it - if you can get the damping together with more gain than you'll possibly need, how clean will your "clean" playing sound.

Masterful players mask extraneous noise because they're masterful and experienced, but don't kid yourself; if you listen to tracks with substantial gain as solo'ed on a mixing board, you'll hear some extraneous noise. It's just that experienced players know what will and won't sit comfortably within a mix (live or recorded), and when the unpleasant variety of the nasties rear their ugly head, they know that some adjustments need to be made with the mechanics or the gear, or both. Which is pretty much what Charlie said.

Bending is really personal, and it's tough to comment without being in the same room. For that matter, damping is personal as well. For me, it's a perpetual marriage between the right and left hands, and I've always had difficulty in analyzing it toward the goal of understanding it. The problem with things that come fairly natural (damping is among the few things that've come naturally to me) is that they're a bit tough to understand. Another thing to be aware of is that there's a ton of different locations that your fingers can occupy with regards to single notes, double stops, or chords - north, south, east, and west, proximity to frets, etc. - if something sounds wonky, move something just a little bit and listen.

Some guys let the bent string slide over the nail and some don't, the most important thing is that your right hand palm is muting the strings lower in pitch by resting on them and your left hand first finger is muting the higher pitched strings, if any, by loosely resting on them. Your palm just follows your picking hand up and down the strings as it goes and mutes everything below the string you are playing. Start working on that slowly and maybe slow down in general and work up to speed.
You want to play clean? Get a metronome or drum box, this is as valuable as any scale book out there.

Thanks for the advice fellas, I'm workin my way back to sanity. I hadn't thought about the position of my fingers on the frets, and when I stopped and took a look it seems as though i'd have better clarity if I arched my fingers a little more, as that seems to be some of the issue with bumping other strings. Right hand muting makes sense, but what about players like SRV who seem to constantly pick with a strumming-like motion? I guess that just adds to the chunky rhythymic feel.

Listen to some reggae. Those guys do a sort of double damping on the "one drop" style classic strum - quick downstroke and almost immediate release of the left hand. That's sort of what SRV is doing on single notes at times. But he also liked to hear the noise of the strum at times, I think.

Also, and you might not want to hear it, but a lot of "the greats" use(d) heavier gauge strings and a high(er) action. This forces you to play clean and with definition and "definiteness" (not the same things, more like "authority.") Also gives you a better tone, of course. Chet for example used fairly high action and heavier strings, and how clean was he? :shock:

Even with lighter strings, remember also to sometimes let the amp do the work - you may be picking harder than you need to.

Yeah, SRV's flailing kind of style looked wacky, but he was still muting in there.

mud

One thing that really helped me is playing the amp super clean and overly loud. Sounds sterile, lots of extraneous noise, and I sounded terrible! I couldn't believe how sloppy my playing was at first, but practice and being more careful I somehow adjusted over time and sounded better (at least to me), then when I had a chance to jam with a distorted amp again, I couldn't believe how much better I sounded before the clean amp experience. No hiding!