News Roundup

Happy New Year to all! Brandon Acker has a new video comparing the loudness of nail and flesh techniques. As expected, he finds no significant difference in volume. It’s a common misconception that playing without nails means a reduction in volume (i.e. decibels); what it actually means is a change in frequencies (to generalize, the ratio of low to high frequencies changes).

On Christmas day, a new video of Carles Trepat (who cut off his nails 3 years ago) was released. He is playing a composition based on Llobet’s arrangement of the Catalan Christmas song ‘Lo noi de la mare’. It is a wonderful performance. Casa Sors, as always, did an excellent job recording the performance — Carles’ tone comes across beautifully:

I have added Josef Zuth (writer, teacher, and founder of the magazine Zeitschrift für die Gitarre), Erwin Schwarz-Reiflingen (writer, editor, and publisher of Die Gitarre), and Quintín Esquembre (composer and student of Tarrega) to the list of historic players. And John Schneiderman to the contemporary players. See the full lists here.

There are more confirmed historic players still — most in the 19th century played with flesh, outside Spain. I’ve decided that because the number is so large it would not be useful to publish the complete list on the website. I’ve limited the list to the more interesting examples, and, when I have more time, I’ll write pages for them.

For contemporary players, however, I will continue to include everyone I can find.