+1
I strum all over the place depending on what I feel like or the song calls for. The middle pickup has never got in my way. I'd feel constrained if I was limited to strum/pick in only one area. This thread reminds of the thread from the amp forum last week where some guy could only play guitar with his amp 40cm from the wall and standing 2 meters from the amp.

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Obligatory gear list: Fender, Rickenbacker, Gibson, Gretsch, Vox, Martin, and more Fender.

First thing I'd like to say is great forum and thanks for the posts! Second, I will obvoiusly keep experimenting with different picking positions as many of you have pointed out, it really depends on the songs or type of music I'm playing. Hell, I've only had the guitar for 4 days and continue to discover the coolness of the Strat so I'll just keep jamming.

One tidbit, I'm a huge Jeff Beck fan and I just watched his show Live at Ronnie Scotts on Palladia music channel and he is all over the place on the guitar....with no pick!!!!! Not sure how he gets his speed using that thumb of his but man is he awsome.

Thanks again everyone for their tips and advice.

At least you kept on playing! I ended up quitting around age 7 and didn't pick it back up again until I was 17. Now honestly, most of that was due to my parents...I really wanted an electric (even something like the equivalent of a cheap Squier would have gone a long ways back then) but after 3 years of hemming an hawing, I just gave up. That said I do also have to credit my teacher for a good deal of my early failure too...aside from the whole picking thing (and other similar incidents) the -only- thing the guy would teach me was the old "Sam Fox Modern Guitar Method" (the Mel Bay of the 70's). At that time I wanted to play the kind of music my older brother listened to which was stuff like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Elvis, The Shocking Blue, etc., but after 3 years of "When the Saints go Marching in" and "Little Brown Jug"...honestly, I'm kind of surprised I even came back to music!

I guess that's one of the biggest reasons why to this day I really have issues with a lot of music teachers. There are just sooooooo many bad teachers out there. So many of them will only teach a student how to play from "books" (and often really bad books at that) instead of really teaching them to play music. Sure, theory is an important tool, but it's not the end all, be all of playing and for most contemporary forms of music, being able to "play by ear" and understand "feel" is just as important, if not considerably more so...and a great many music teachers simply don't teach that at all. Knowing a such and such scale is all fine and dandy but it doesn't mean crap if you don't know how to apply it.

Anyways, I feel your pain there bro...I'm glad that we both got past our early teacher issues .

Peace,
Jim

I let the arm rest work as my pivot point when playing, but just like my les paul, I favor the neck, just behind the neck pickup.

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"Epitaph on a blues musician’s tombstone: “I didn’t wake up this morning”" Davy Knowles


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good question, let's have a look....

it's over the middle pu.

cheers