so ive been practicing CW for about 3 months now and i finally got a decent paddle (Bencher BY-1) to replace the straight key i was using to learn. problem is everything i send sounds kind of mushy and run together, like the dits and dahs arent clean. i set my keyer speed to around 15 wpm which is where i want to eventually operate but maybe thats too fast for me right now?

i've been messing with the weighting on my K3NG keyer and i honestly dont know what im doing with that setting. does anyone have like a starting point for weighting they use? i read somewhere 50% is standard but when i record myself and play it back it still sounds off. also my paddle tension might be too loose because sometimes i get extra dits when i didnt mean to. this is probably a whole bunch of problems at once lol

any advice from people who actually use paddles daily would be really helpful, im getting frustrated but i dont want to give up on CW

yeah the mushy sound is almost always a combination of speed being too high and paddle adjustment, you kind of nailed it yourself. drop back to maybe 10-12 wpm and leave it there for a few weeks, i know it feels slow but your muscle memory needs time to actually form. trying to jump ahead just builds in bad habits that take forever to unlearn.

for the weighting, 50% is your starting point and honestly most people leave it right there. if anything i run mine just slightly heavier like 52-53% because i like a slightly longer dah but thats personal preference, dont overthink it until your timing is more consistent. the extra dits you're getting are definitely a tension issue, tighten it up more than you think you need to and see if that clears it up. a lot of people new to paddles set way too light because it feels easier but you lose control. the Bencher BY-1 is a solid paddle, you got a good one, just takes time to dial in.

oh man i went through exactly this like a year ago. what helped me was actually recording myself on audacity and then looking at the waveform, you can literally see when your dits are too short or you're squishing the gaps between characters. sounds nerdy but it was kind of eye opening for me.

also someone told me to practice sending individual characters super slowly and perfectly before trying to string words together, like just send the letter C over and over until it sounds exactly right before moving on. boring but it works