Pad to Fight Stick transition - any advice, tips, or tricks are gladly appreciated!

So I just got a chance to play my brand new Mad Catz Arcade Fight Stick Pro.  The first game I used it for was Injustice.  Went through the tutorial and was very pleased at how responsive the buttons are.  The moves are so much easier to execute then with a pad.

Then I decided to give it a go with SSFIV and was surprised at how difficult it was to do a simple Haduken fire ball with Ryu.  Then after several attempts with very few being successful I quit SSFIV for the moment and started up Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 and the same thing happened.  "WTF!" is what I was thinking.  I must have spent almost a hour and a half trying to do the spider-swing with Spider-Man.   

At this moment I hit the wall.  This was the point where I've read so many other comments about how hard the transition is from pad to fight stick.  Now I get it. 

I wanted to know if there is anyone who has been a seasoned pad player with fighting games and made the leap to fight sticks.  How was the transition?  What helped the most - what didn't help at all?  Any resources - videos, tutorials, articles, etc. that help would be much appreciated! 

The advice you'll hear the most (for good reason) is to practice a ton. Go drill yourself on doing basic motions for a couple of weeks and you'll probably be fine.

Make sure you're using a grip that's both comfortable for you and not inhibiting your range of motion.

Yeah, you just gotta keep at it. I'm not sure what kind of gate you have, but I found that the square wasn't ideal for me considering that I spent all of my former arcade time on circles. I switched out to an octagon and found it to be a good compromise. Hitting those weird supers that zig zag all over the gate is a bit easier now.

dohdough said:

Yeah, you just gotta keep at it. I'm not sure what kind of gate you have, but I found that the square wasn't ideal for me considering that I spent all of my former arcade time on circles. I switched out to an octagon and found it to be a good compromise. Hitting those weird supers that zig zag all over the gate is a bit easier now.

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I have a square gate but I'll give the octagon a try. From what I've seen it doesn't seem hard to install.

I had an easier time with the octo gate, and yeah, it's quite easy to install.

I recently switched to an octo gate too after trying for years to make the square gate work. I have large hands that definitely don't qualify as nimble so I tend to ride the gate a lot. Much better execution now.

Jeez I need to get one of these for the PS3 since getting Aquapazza.  Have it for the 360 but trying to pull off the Splash Arts on the pad is a bitch.