Tremolo

One of the most frequent questions I receive is, can you play tremolo without fingernails? The answer is an emphatic yes! Though it will sound different.

When Tárrega (1852-1909) cut off his nails, he continued playing the same music, including his tremolo pieces like Recuerdos de la Alhambra. The no-nail players who descended from Tárrega frequently played tremolo pieces, too. One example is Manuel Cubedo (1937-2011), a student of Emilio Pujol who made a recording of Alhambra in 1965:

Another notable, earlier student of Pujol is Francisco Alfonso (1908-1940). Reviewing a 1937 London concert, Boris Perott (now best remembered as the Russian émigré who was Julian Bream’s first teacher) praised Alfonso’s tremolo:

I have never heard any body else playing “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” so perfectly and with such expression; it must be attributed, in part, to the fact that Alfonso plays with his finger tips and not with the nails like Segovia and Luise Walker.¹

Wilfred Appleby also wrote an article praising Alfonso’s tremolo, as well as the tremolo of another no-nailer, Jean Fuller.²

Pujol (and likely Tárrega) taught that apoyando should be used wherever possible, which included arpeggios and tremolo. According to Pujol, without nails the tremolo is no longer metallic and brilliant, but acquires an ethereal sonority’.³

Outside the Tárrega school, a no-nail player celebrated for his tremolo was the American guitarist William Foden (1860-1947). You find the technique in many of his large-scale works, and it ranges from a one finger tremolo (i.e. moving one finger back and forth very quickly) to the pami tremolo more familiar today. In his book The Guitar in America, Jeffrey Noonan wrote that, ‘Performance reviews lionized his prodigious pyrotechnic feats, especially his playing of arpeggios and tremolo.’⁴

Last year, Brandon Acker made a recording of Alhambra without nails:

And Danilo Delli Carri has also recorded Alhambra:

1. Boris Perott, ‘Bravo, Alfonso!’, BMG, 34.387 (1937), p. 235. ↩︎
2. Wilfred M. Appleby, ‘The Spanish Guitar’, BMG 47.537 (1950), pp. 95. ↩︎
3. Emilio Pujol, El dilema del sonido en la guitarra (Ricordi Americana, 1960), p. 57. ↩︎
4. Jeffery J. Noonan, The Guitar in America: Victorian Era to Jazz Age (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), p. 84. ↩︎