LH fretting technique, tone (& plain wire trebles)

[RJVB]

Hi,

I've often wanted to ask about this in various contexts; here's one that's as good as any.

To what extent do you use fretting technique as a means to influence tone (colour) - beyond vibrato, bends and stopping/preventing unwanted strings from vibrating?

I'm currently using my archtop for rehearsals with the classical guitar ensemble I play in, and I realised I can make the trebles blend in a lot better if I place my fingers so close to the frets that there's enough flesh hanging over them to mute the string just a little bit. Gives a much rounder sound (and of course you can get a bigger and somewhat different effect if you "misplace" the finger even more).

Am I reinventing the wheel?

It's tricky though; coming from a fretless instrument that requires very precise finger placement I'm used to mapping the pitch I need to an exact finger position. (And thus annoyed observing that despite that my aim isn't that good at all when I'm looking, i.e. guiding the LH with my eyes).

[whiskey02]

I think exactly as you stated above, the closer your flesh to the fret the better. Perhaps a little more noticeable on acoustic but for sure true on electric too.

[RJVB]

Yeah, I've seen the general remarks about it, but AFAICR that's usually about getting a clean sound, not so much about sound colour.

[pauln]

You're on track just fine. The pressure, proximity to the fret, slight contact/overlap of the fret... all that makes a tonal difference because of what the string is experiencing immediately after it is picked. The profile is attack, decay, sustain, and release (ADSR). The attack is the first few milliseconds during which the chaotic motion of the string just picked settles down to establish its fundamental frequency of vibration, its harmonics, and their nodes.

One of the critical things in establishing itself is the sounding length of the string, which is determined by the terminations (the bridge saddle and the fingered fret). The way the finger is place behind, at, on, or over the fret changes how the string "sees" that termination - as either a precise hard termination, or a soft diffuse termination. The former will include more well defined harmonics, the latter will tend to filter out some of the higher harmonics... so absolutely yes, your fret finger placement acts as a tone control at the moment of picking.

The other side of the coin is the timing of the finger placement (sort of) and the picking. Like the finger placement position, this is hard to learn to do deliberately; it comes as an indirect thing by thinking something else. In the long run, your fingers learn how to place at the fret to make the tones you want to hear; likewise the timing of the fretting and picking is something that comes indirectly from experience. This timing is whether you fret before picking, or just very slightly before, or what even might be indistinguishable from simultaneous... these variations are just milliseconds but your reaction time is on the order of about 250ms, so you can't really "do it", you can only just learn how you want it to sound and let your fingers learn how to make it happen.