Wolf tones and muting on a six-string while playing chords

When I'm playing fingerstyle, I use the floating thumb technique to mute any ringing strings. Between my fretting hand and my plucking hand, I do a decent job of muting stuff (I'm kind of sloppy and could probably improve, but it isn't terrible).

When I play chords on my six, though, I get ringing on the low B (and sometimes E if I'm not careful). I tend to play things in a fingerstyle fashion, similar to a classical guitar - using my thumb, index, and middle finger to pluck or arpeggiate chords. When I do this, I find it extremely difficult to mute strings with my plucking hand. (Chords on the A, G, and C strings are easier to mute since I can use some of the meat of my thumb, but chords on the E, G, and C are pretty bad.) Further, I get wolf tones quite a bit when moving chords; fretting chords and muting with the fretting hand seems to be a bit of an overload.

Does anyone have any tips for this? I know that some people use mutes at the headstock or bridge to control some of this, but I'd like to see if there's something that I can do naturally without resorting to this. Thanks!

 

While that makes sense, I was hoping to find people with experience doing this on a six-string bass. In theory, everything is fairly simple to do, but I'd like to strive for efficiency if possible. (As an example - Jaco muted his strings with his thumb, pinky, and ring finger. It worked really well for him because he practiced all the time. What if, however, he'd decided to use floating thumb? Would he have come up to speed quicker if he'd used a more efficient technique?) I'm just looking for actual advice from people with experience on a six to point me in a good direction so that I can make progress quicker.

 

Thanks for the advice! I've actually begun to fix this in a different way - instead of playing chords as I would on a classical guitar with an arched palm, I'm playing it with muted strings.

Before:



After:



Note the thumb position - basically using a variant of the floating thumb technique to mute the strings as I pluck them. This seems to be working fairly well for me so far.

 

To be fair, I was sitting on the couch when I took that picture (I wasn't actually playing, just demonstrating the hand position); my wrist is a better when I'm actually playing (especially standing).

I'm lucky that I have bendy thumbs; those who don't have double-jointed thumbs might have an issue with this technique.