Mooh, thanks for the "welcome back". My points were probably expressed a little more stridently than I meant them to be. In the end, what works... works. And as I said, there have been too many great guitarists who played in all sorts of different styles, and with all sorts of different techniques, for me to claim that I have the one and only "right" answer to this. For me, wrapping would restrict my hand too much. But I'm humble enough to recognize that there are some incredible players out there who view this differently.

To be fair, the other situation where I've seen a lot of wrapping (is this becoming the accepted term?) is with rock'n'roll guitar players -- which typically employ a low-slung guitar with a skinny neck. Some of them are quite good at it (Hendrix, Page, Townshend, etc.), but that's really a whole different style, and largely a chordal one; the single-string leads these folks do generally aren't played with a thumb wrap, to the best of my recollection.

McGrath, I still have trouble thinking of a situation where I would need a wrap to produce a particular chord or set of notes. Your "barred G with the second finger raised" example simply has two strings playing the note sounded by the open G string (the open G string being one, and the fifth-fret D string being the other). In the context of a full six-string chord I would not feel that there is any real advantage to playing that note on two strings simultaneously; to play that chord, I'd probably just play a standard first-position G chord (with three open strings), and mute the low B if I didn't want it to sound.

Mooh, I also barre on the mandolin (I know it doesn't mean much, since I barre on everything). My guess is that, even among those who wrap on guitar, you'll find few who wrap on mandolin. Those little strings are awfully close together, and I have trouble imagining anyone getting that kind of precision with their thumb. But if you are inclined to do it, at least it's a thin neck.

See you guys next time -- WS