Flesh vs. Nails: Fingerstyle Guitar
If you are learning fingerstyle guitar, you may wonder if you should go with your nails or bare fingers. Today, I’ll give you some advantages and disadvantages of each approach. A lot of this decision lies on the types of music you want to perform.
Tone Quality:
Nails: You’ll get a sharper and clearer sound using your nails. The overall tone of your nails is determined by the length, shape, and density of the nails. Nails if improperly polished or shaped can yield a scratchy or unpleasant sound.
Flesh: The sound from your bare fingers is warmer or rounder. It won’t project as much. However, it’ll be smoother while less clear. It’s possible that there is less of a dynamic range with only your fingers.
Technique:
Nails: You’ll be able to play faster with nails. This is because nails slide off the string faster.
Technically, it may take the beginner a longer period of time to get used to playing with nails. Why? They extend further and you have to learn to judge distance without being able to feel the touch-point.
In addition, a small adjustment to the angle of nail attach changes the tone greatly. This requires more initial technique experimenting.
Flesh: Bare flesh will simply be easier to use from day one. You have immediate tactile feedback from the strings. Flesh works great if you don’t plan on playing anything fast. I’d say that it is harder to mess up from a technical point of view.
Maintenance
Nails: They require much greater maintenance. You’ll have to experiment and find the best length and shape for your own fingers. Learning how to shape nails takes time to learn. I recommend learning about ramping. To get the best tone and speed, you’ll want to keep them polished. If you keep longer nails, there’s a great risk of them breaking. If you have a job in manual labor or work out in the yard a lot, nails will be an inconvenience because they can split easily. Suppose you get used to the sound of nails and then right before a gig, you break a nail? There are things you can do, like glue material to the nails; however, it will always be more involved than using your bare fingers.
Flesh: It doesn’t get much easier from a maintenance point of view. Flesh requires nothing of you. At the same time, it may take awhile for your fingers to get calloused enough so you no longer feel pain after a long practice session.
String Material Considerations
Most classical guitarists use nails. However, they use nylon strings. On steel strings, nails are more apt to produce a scraping sound if they aren’t shaped correctly. Steel strings are also more likely to wear down your fingernails. I’ve had them split my own fingernails.
My Opinion
I personally use nails because I like the volume and projection I get. With flesh, I find myself playing harder and eventually my finger tips hurt. At the same time, some of my favorite players like Alan Gogoll use no nails or very little. My main gripe about using nails is I do a lot of yardwork and I can split my nails if they are too long. Therefore, I try to keep them somewhat shorter.
Looking for some good fingerstyle guitar strings? These are the strings I use on my Eastman OM guitar: D’Addario XT light gauge.
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