Strings

What strings work best will depend on both the player and their guitar — I can’t emphasise this enough. For me, carbon strings are the one type that do not work well without nails. [I have to take this back entirely. I’ve since tried carbons again and quite liked them — see this video.]

Normal nylon strings work fine. Many no-nail players, however, prefer treble strings that are a bit rough, in order to give the right-hand something to ‘grip’ onto. Rectified nylon strings, gut strings, or Aquila Ambra 800/900s (synthetic gut) will give you this. You can also lightly rub the plucking area of a normal nylon string with fine grit sandpaper (I use 1200 grit); this won’t affect your string other than to give it a rougher texture. None of this is necessary, I must repeat. I do prefer rough-textured strings myself, though I’m not sure whether they actually give me a psychical advantage or just a psychological reassurance!

Any tension can work. At first, you will almost certainly want to use low tension and/or tune your guitar down by as much as a whole tone — your fingertips will take time to adjust to their new role. Eventually, though, you will find most string tensions useable. I prefer normal-high tension trebles, so that I can really push with the right-hand, and my guitar seems to respond well to them. Historically, high tension strings were more common than we often think. In his Guitar School, Emilio Pujol recommends very high tension strings. There is also evidence (albeit slight) suggesting that the string tension on some nineteenth-century guitars may have been higher than is commonly thought.¹ For me, the advantages of low-tension strings are more to do with the left-hand: they make slurs and vibrato easier.

However, what works for me may not work for you. Some guitars do not respond well to certain strings or tensions, and some players will prefer the sonority of a low tension string tuned to, say, 415hz. I nearly always tune to 440hz. This is partly out of necessity — so that I can play with other musicians — but also because I prefer the higher tension. Nevertheless, it’s perfectly legitimate to do otherwise. The nineteenth-century guitarist Catharina Pratten advised her students to tune all the way down to 392hz. Rob MacKillop tunes each of his guitars differently, depending on where he feels the guitar is most responsive. There is no one-size-fits-all — experiment!

1. James Tyler and Paul Sparks, The Guitar and Its Music: From the Renaissance to the Classical Era (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 258-259. ↩︎