How sensitive is an electric guitar supposed to be? I have an Epiphone ES335 Dot, with either light or extra light gauge strings (I’ve forgotten) and find that when I fret a chord, the fingers I use to fret the lower two strings (i.e. low E and A) make the guitar “sound”. Obviously, this does not happen on studio recordings, or even any live recording that I can come to think of.
Is this normal for an electric guitar (bearing in mind I’m used to an acoustic which does not have this problem), is it a problem with my heavy handed technique, or a problem with the set up?
Could be couple of things, maybe the action is too high, means that the strings vibrate on the frets.
It could also be that the frets are not level all along the way of the neck, which then forces a higher action…
A slightly twisted neck or warped neck, depending upon the direction of bend might be a problem.
The final thing is that the frets may not be set in dead square across the neck.
Since you are using light gauge strings, did you adjust the neck brace ? This would only be relevant if the instrument was originally set up for a heavier gauge of string.
It might be a godd idea to see where exactly along the neck this occurs, if it tends to be more in one place than another it would lend itself to being more likely neck movement.
It seems to happen all the way along the neck for both the A and E strings. No matter how lightly I place my fingers down, some sound is emmitted from my amp, which isn’t the case on the higher strings.
I can’t see how you could avoid sounding those strings when you touch them. And of course, being the most massive strings, I would expect them to produce the largest signal. When I built my electric mandolin (these are notoriously hot), this was my biggest problem. I had to train myself to touch lightly and slowly on the bass side. For me, the toughest part is the sound from releasing them.
Especially when I’m playing a key that does not have that string’s open tone in it.
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It can be diminished quite a bit with technique, but I had a really hard time with it.
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Maybe I should just wind some coils with 4 pole pieces that I could adjust. Make 'em light on the bass side. Can you adjust yours futher from the strings?
One of the reasons that you do not hear this on recordings is that they use signal processing such as compression. This cuts off all sounds that do not exceed a certain volume threshold, making a recording sound much cleaner, at a cost of some dynamic range.
That being said, perhaps you can help minimize the problem by fretting the notes at the instant they are to be picked. If you are fast enough, you won’t hear it.
Oh, and practice playing a selection cleanly, then build up to the proper speed.
There was a very popular song a few years back that was played on an acoustic guitar and had all kinds of terrible fret noises in it. It actually made me and other guitar players cringe when we heard it. I can’t remember the name right now though.
Electric guitars are just more prone to unwanted sounds like this, and if you play a lot you get used to where the noises come from and develop techniques to reduce most of them, such as not pressing the strings into position until you are ready to hit them with the pick.
A lot of lead guitar playing (like Eddie Van Halen style stuff) takes advantage of these extra noises, and actually rely on “hammering” out the notes instead of picking them, while picking other notes at the same time. This isn’t just for lead guitar type stuff either. On one song, Eddie wanted a mexican guitar type sound, but couldn’t play that style of music, so instead he came up with a similar type of sound by hammering out notes. You can hammer out notes on an acoustic too, but it’s much more difficult.
If you are using distortion and you crank up the distortion level quite a bit, the guitar will be much more sensitive to noises like accidentally hammering out notes and sliding fingers along the strings. Reducing the distortion level will also reduce the extra unwanted noises a bit. Mostly though, you just need to work on technique so you don’t make the noises in the first place.
What they (the other posters) said - in my experience, I spent more time learning to get strings NOT to sound on the electric guitar than to get the sounds I wanted. I do more with my hands, fingers, palms, etc. muting strings that making chords…some people are gentle, accurate players who play a clean-sounding guitar and have to worry less about this. I am not one of those people - I play aggressively with a strong pick style and like bashing the strings; therefore, I must compensate.