It’s also a matter of experimentation. You need to finger a D chord, say, and pluck one string at a time. If one or more strings are muted, you have to slightly adjust the position of your fingers, your hand, your wrist, perhaps your guitar neck, basically anything and everything, to see if you can get all strings sounding clean. Often only a very small adjustment is necessary.
A couple of other things: the fingertips (the distal phalanx, the last segment of your finger) should be perpendicular to the fretboard, very perpendicular. You have to cut your fingernails on the fretting hand short in order to achieve this.
Once you find the position that works, then you should start working on changes to and from that chord (not before).
Completely new guitar student here, and finding these chords remarkably difficult to play cleanly. As I experiment with finger and hand placement I came up with a few questions.
Wrt wrist bend, presumably this should be minimized for comfort/health reasons. How would you describe the acceptable range of wrist bend?
Wrt thumb/finger alignment, as your fingers move up and down the frets for various chords (say string 1-3 vs 4-6, or even minimally between the D and A chords) does the thumb remain “anchored” on the neck or does it “float” to stay in relative alignment with the fingers? Or is there some other dynamic at play?
Is there a preferred forearm angle (wrt the floor, or maybe the neck)?
