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z6 -> RE: In praise of shorter nails. . . (Apr. 25 2014 10:15:01)
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I never played classical with no nails.
I cut my nails in order to do tapping on a midi guitar controller. I had 'dabbled' in flamenco over the years and found that my inability to play picado had been because of a nail.
With no nails the technique was easy and natural... and it sounded like poop. But if you do it a lot you develop calouses. They are pretty hard, believe me, and there is a lot of mincing pain as well. (I got lots of blisters but played through them as much as I could.)
But, when they got to a stage where a little 'tit' was forming on the tips of the fingers and I had to file them, the sound was a lot less poopy, or 'warm poopy'. (See my previous post for a description of the sound on the 'poop scale'.)
I've been over this before here. Nails are miles easier for me but only when I filed them 'right' and after glue was applied. The glue, as Ricardo had claimed, somehow took care of the hook.
I would only ever advise no nails when one has no options left at all. But I would never have 'got' picado without accidentally playing without nails. It seemed impossible for my fingers to do it.
And I was hugely skeptical of Ricardo's claim. I knew he was telling the truth but thought perhaps there was some happenstance at play. But he was, and is, spot on.
But absolutely, having the right nails is wonderful. It gives the whole thing a very easy feel. Without nails, there has to be a lot of power going into it but with nails the relaxation produces the power and it is much more an 'effortless' pursuit.
But, yes, even craggy, hard macho calouses are crappy compared to nails.
Put it this way, if my nails all fell apart one day I would go no nails rather than the Salon route or artificial. But only maybe because I was 'forced' in a sense to do it for long enough to know there are advantages. And these things are always and only relevant to one's own tone or abilities or the 'feel' one requires.
Imagine the difference between Paco playing with nails and without nails. He would sound like poop to himself but everyone else would have been saying, if that's poop I'm cutting mine tomorrow.
The sound, or feel, one starts with, without nails, is very different to the sound, and feel, after the skin is almost as hard as nails.
It taught me to grab the strings. To get closer to the top. To concentrate on my rhythm and accents, simply because it is harder to do so maybe a little more relaxation is invoked (as one says to one's self: this is stupid).
But maybe that's why my perception is that classical and flamenco right hand techniques are wildly different, even if they look alike. I cannot imagine classical guitar doing that (forming massive calouses) as it was endless hours of picado practise that formed them. I expect there are classical players who would see apoyando as picado but for me it is not, they are very very different. And that difference can almost be 'tracked' as a function of the relative poopyness of one's calouses.
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