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Nails on your Right Hand

Kmrumedy

Kmrumedy

May 12, 2004
1,940
2,770
Montreal, Canada
#1
Cool. I'll go first.

I'm really interested in playing electric guitar using finger style on my right plucking hand. Problem is you I lose a lot of speed if I do not have nails. My fingers stick under the strings. It's immediately much better technique wise when I grow them out. Problem then is nails sound like crap on a bass and I have to cut them down.

What is a solution or compromise?

I'll throw in some guitar porn as an intro. My guitar....

 
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#4
Kmrumedy said:
It's immediately much better technique wise when I grow them out.
Click to expand...
That may be true for classical or flamenco technique but not all finger style requires nails to pluck.
This old school ragtime /blues /gospel finger style is my favorite.




There is also combined flatpicking + fingerstyle, a la Glenn Campbell


as well as Tommy Emmnauel style thumb pick:


As far as I can see nails are only a necessity if that is the specific timbre you seek.
 
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#5
IMO, at a basic level, there's no possible compromise between having nails and not. Either the nails contact the string, or they don't. It's like being pregnant.

What you *can* affect is how much nail is contacting the string. As you probably know, most (though by no means all) classical guitarists use a combination of flesh and a short-ish nail, so that for each stroke you're using both. That gives you a slightly fuller sound than nails alone would, or even long nails.

But at some point you may have to decide which is more important to you, facility on electric guitar or your ideal bass sound. If you really want to play electric guitar that way (fingers + nails), you'll just have to suck up the way it changes your bass tone. You can compensate for these changes to a greater or lesser extent, but it may not be possible to have it all.

BTW, I don't agree that nails on bass sound bad. I've been doing it for decades, because I'm unwilling to give up the way it sounds on nylon-string guitar. And I can still get a sound I like. I do agree that using nails changes the bass sound, though. You just need to adjust. That generally means EQing differently, either on the bass, on the amp, or both. At least IME.

Then again, what works for me might not work for you. YMMV.

EDIT: Forgot to reinforce the point that, as has been posted above, you don't necessarily require nails at all to play electric guitar. Pretty sure Knopfler and Beck didn't, just to name two. That may be the solution to your question right there.
 
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#7
No nails and no issue with finger plucking. It’s still possible to grow the nail just long enough to still plug with your tips but use your nail for some twang, almost like a pinch harmonic (or maybe it’s actually one, lol)

You could also try some banjo finger caps too. Not common but who cares.
 
#11
You can play classical with finger or nails.
Your nails, you fingers, and your ears can all affect it, and some guitar players experiment with it all, including finger and/or thumb picks as mentioned above.
Try different ways, if you haven’t already.
I don’t like nails on bass, and so finger picking for me is finger or hybrid (finger and nail)
But it sounds like finger pucks might be helpful in your case.
 

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