Guitar Progress [Unwanted lift-off plucking]

There are various muting techniques...as you get smoother and fluider I'm guessing they'll come more or less by themselves.

You can try muting them but when you slide your finger and it squeaks it's considered normal and yes, it's part of the charm of the sound it makes... for me at least. I like the squeak. It's a sound I've come to love. It makes guitar sound more organic.



Can you hear the squeak here? Doesn't it sound just lovely?

Anyhow, you can try palm muting the string or an even easier way is to try lifting the finger without completely detaching it from the string if you don't want it to ring clear, or somehow mute it with other fingers that feel more comfortable for you, be it from your fretting hand or picking hand.

It is probably a matter of fluidity, as Friedrich says.

The same thing used to happen to me. For a little while I tried to deaden the strings in between changes but this led to an un-flowing, disjointed performance; it was some time before I learnt to mute comfortably.

I think I solved it finally by emulating Kurt Cobain who, in guitar riffs, would often bash the open strings quite noisily in between fret-hand changes - to cover the pause of the change and the noise of it, which is even more pronounced on a distorted electric. (Other times he would use fret-hand mutes to cover.) Sometimes his open-string bashing would complement the riff harmonically, but not always; the bashing always occurred at a rhythmically acceptable place though and so became part of the rhythm of the riff, integral to it. Upon reflection now, I guess what he was doing in his own way was sacrificing concordance for rhythmic fluidity; a smart choice - you can get away with playing a dubious note but if you screw the rhythm you lose everything.

A pull-off is when you play the note by lifting your fretting finger off the string, and a hammer-on is playing the note by 'hammering' down with your fretting finger.