flat picking and sustain ?

[Hooligan]

I have noticed that when flat picking chords I tend to kill the sound when I lift my fingers off the strings to fret the next chord. It is really very distracting when I listen to recordings. I hear people all the time picking notes and they have plenty of sustain. What could I be doing wrong?

[scooteraz]

Well, no matter who is playing, once you lift fingers to change chords, the fingered string is damped and sustain is killed. Sometimes hear recordings where there are actually multiple tracks of a guitar being played, and at the chord change, one track will just let the sustain go on while the other track has the chord change.

Other times, I notice that a specific note or set of notes are allowed to drone. Particularly open notes. Using a D or Dm chord form going up the neck, you can get
D, Em/D, F#m/D, G/D, A/D, Bm/D. The D (4th string) is left open and drones on. Another kind of drone is when the upper strings of a chord don't change, but the base note is moved around. Perhaps the easiest example would be a C or Am on a descending bass line. C, C/B, C/A, C/G, C/F, C/E. In this example the upper 3 strings never change fingering. Norwegian Wood is a good example of this as well on the D chord with a moving base note that follows the melody.

So long as you don't damp the strings next to the fingered strings, anything open should sustain. With my fat fingers, that is sometimes easier said than done. But work on it. Certainly, a change like G to Em should have the G and B strings sustaining throughout the change. Try chord voicings that maximize the number of open strings.

One other possibility is that you are too critical of your own playing. I know that I can find every mistake I make, and even some I don't.

As far as flat picking (as opposed to what, strumming or finger picking; i.e what do you do when not flat picking?) you could be dragging part of your right hand onto the strings and causing part of the damping.

Just some ideas.

[MadHatter]

one thing that works nice is to walk the bass line into each chord...
learn how to play skynyrds simple man....

[Teleguy]

Sometimes there are common notes so you can hold a note or two while making the new chord (descending bass lines allow this: like walking down bass notes when moving from C to Am).
This allows the illusion of more legato movements vs changing complete "grips."