Nailcare

You may be thinking, wait, I thought an advantage of cutting off my nails was no longer spending hours carefully shaping, filing and polishing my nails! And you would mostly be right. I only spend 5-10 minutes on my nails every two or three days. But it is important that I do tend to them, for two main reasons:

• If they are too long, they can accidentally come in contact with the string.
• I want to make sure the nails are rounded, following the shape of the fingertip, and aren’t sharp and jagged, so that they complement and support the flesh of the finger and don’t dig in to the skin. It’s much better to use something like a glass file than nail clippers, as the former allow for greater precision and a smoother result.

In terms of the ideal length, everyone is different. Emilio Pujol wrote that the nail should be filed as far back as in will go.¹ For some players, this is absolutely necessary — beginners often underestimate how far back they need to file, and often don’t realise they are accidentally using nail. However, for some fingertip shapes, a very small bit of nail can possibly help support the flesh. It also depends how you pluck the string — some positions allow you to get away with more nail. Fernando Sor, for example, would allow a tiny bit of nail to grow so he could use it as an occasional special effect.

The thumb nail can be grown out quite far without it getting in the way, particularly if you shape it so that it is shorter on the left side. There are some musical reasons why you might want to do this, but personally I do it for two non-musical reasons: 1) a part of me, for whatever peculiar psychological reason, wants to keep a small bit of nail on my right hand, and 2) it can be useful for opening food packages and the like!

1. Emilio Pujol, Guitar School, ed. Matanya Orphee, trans. Brian Jeffery (Editions Orphee, 1983), p. 49. ↩︎