where should my pick be striking the strings at?

I use a fender strat.

My guitar teacher said I should be anchoring my wrist to the bridge of the guitar so I can learn to play the strings by feel instead of looking at them. The problem is though that anywhere I position my hand on the bridge I am either muting strings constantly, or I am unable to mute at all if I need to.

When the heel of my palm is on the bridge, it is natural for me to pick in between the pickup closest to the bridge, and the one in the middle.

Yet every instructional video I see on this site with the guy with the long ponytail playing a red strat he is all over the place.

Everyone is different. Players anchor their picking hand in several different ways - most popularly either at the bridge as your instructor is suggesting, or by hooking a finger around the bottom of a pickup as a reference point.

I think you're talking about Chris on the red strat... and it sounds like he goes the same way as me - no anchoring at all which means your hand can move freely across the area to get different tones. It's also useful for some of the more advanced techniques when you get there.

Like so many other aspects of playing guitar, there is not so much a 'correct' way as a personal preference. If it works for you it's right. From what you're saying on muting etc, it sounds like you need to become more familiar with it to get the muting down.

You may find anchoring your picking hand a limitation further down the line - all I can really suggest is have an experiment with it and see what feels most natural for you. You should be able to find the string you need in time whether you anchor or not.

Thank you for the response. That being said I think I am going to start completely over.

I had not touched the guitar for a few days as I was too busy and I think I got worse as a result. That practice session got frustrating very quickly. The strings even felt significantly looser to me, despite them being in tune. But I was doing the beginning lessons significantly slower, and sloppier than before.

I'm setting myself up with a new instructor, someone who works out of my local guitar shop. The main reason for this is because even though I did not expect or want to go into music theory so early with the first guy, I learned later on that a few of the things he pointed out to me were wrong.

Learning bad habits and wrong information early on is one of my more significant fears when starting something new, and playing guitar is no exception!

One thing that I think would be a great feature for people starting out like me is having certain videos of a person who just learned the lesson. For example, at the end of each fundamentals video a real beginner is shown who is graduating throughout the lessons. Practice, practice, practice is the order of the day, but I think a lot of people struggle with knowing when they should take on the next lesson or not. I'm sure most of us instinctively know that reviewing material recently learned is extremely important, but we don't necessarily know when we are ready to move on.

Show us a brief example of someone in the same place we are, instead of someone who has been playing for over a decade and we will.

:)