Nails, flesh or finger picks?

ToneControl · November 2021

I used to play with longer nails, now I cut them to exactly the right length that I play with a bit of nail and flesh
I hold my hand out, palm towards face, and tilt the fingers a tiny bit towards me, and the nails should just about show

that works for me, the third finger nail has 3 times the thickness of the other to reach that point, so it's a good way to judge it.
Find out what works for you

Personally I think fingerpicks sound awful on a good acoustic, unless it's amplified anyway and you can EQ it all OK again

I do use a flatpick plectrum on an Adirondack top dread, that sounds amazing

personalnadir · November 2021

I enjoyed learning to play with finger picks. Don’t use them all the time, but a fun little challenge.

Tannin · November 2021

BigPaulie said:

in my personal experience I have found that the best tone comes from nails

Thumb/finger picks sound almost as good

Lastly, flesh sounds crap by comparison in my opinion.

I Imagine that we all have our different views on tone quality. It is most common to regard nails as the best, but fingerpicks and flesh both get wide support as well. There are many great players who use flesh and get fantastic tone. Examples that come straight to mind are Mark Knopfler, Tommy Emmanuel, Lloyd Spiegel, and George Thorogood, but there are many, many others. Michael Watts, who posts here now and then, gets wonderful tone with flesh.

Obviously there are different skills at work (different players are good at extracting good tone with different methods) but I think there is another factor at work: We select and set up our instruments to sound right with the techniques we ourselves use.

When, for example, I look at guitars in a shop, I don't strum them with a plectrum or pluck them with fingerpicks, I play with my fingers - and I only consider buying guitars that sound good played that way. Later on, when a guitar comes home, it gets tweaked with setup adjustments and especially with different strings. I keep on tweaking until I have it sounding the way I want it. And all of that process, from instrument selection in the shop right through to the brand of strings I use, is informed by my preferred technique. If I was a fingerpicker, I'd probably buy a different guitar, and almost certainly use a different type of string.

I used my own example just now, but we all do much the same. Electric players have an even larger set of tweaks to make - all the choices that an acoustic player makes, plus all the things you can do with amps and speakers and pedals and electronics.

My point here is that in the quest for tone, we naturally adjust many other things and eventually tend to paint ourselves into corners. Once you get a technique that works for you, and have adjusted fully to it, it is very difficult to change.

bertie · November 2021

Gassage said:

Ironically, after really loving Steuart Smith recently, I've been trying to work with a thumb pick- but my thumb must be enormous as they're all to small...

Where's the biggest ones found?

try heating them in hot water let em cool a bit - it should make em a tad malleable (bit like the old cheap and cheerful gum-shields)

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Nails, flesh or finger picks?

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