Video: Fingernail Shaping on Classical Guitar

Learn the correct and incorrect ways to shape the fingernails on your playing hand in this free video clip on how to play the classical guitar.

Video Transcript

We are going to talk a little bit about fingernails and fingernail polishing techniques and things like that. One very important factor in producing good tone on the guitar is the shape of the nails and the way that we end up actually polishing them. You want them to be very smooth like glass. A few of the tools we always use is like fine grain fingernail files, like you find in any beauty supply store. A polishing board, it has one side that’s very fine grain and the other side is for buffing and it makes the nail nice and smooth; almost shiny and glass-like. If you are in the know and you know anybody around town who plays classical guitar they can probably get you this, it’s jewelers’ sand paper. I t is very fine grain; it is pretty much what all the pros use. It’s very very important in the production of good tone. If you happen to be cursed with bad nails, say very brittle nails, thin nails or just happen to break one there are a few things you can do. You can pick up a general press-on nail kit at any beauty supply store and some super glue. What you want to do is, is you want to just get rid of the nail that’s a problem, lay one of these guys on and shape it to desire, which I’ll show you in a second and it works just like any a normal nail would once you get once you get the patterns down. Another thing that a lot of the pros do which sounds kind of weird; you can get ping pong balls cut them up and actually form them and glue them underneath your nail and that provides for really good tone and it is actually kind of a secret of the trade that a lot of people do. Now let’s take a look at the actual shape of the nails. When dealing with the shape of the nails, it is important to realize that the string comes in contact with a little bit of the flesh on the side of the finger and this edge of the nail mostly. So first I’ll start with a few bad examples that would produce poor tone. This example is bad because the end of the nail is very pointy. What you are going to have happen is as the string slides against your nail the last thing that it hits is going to be that point and it is going to create a very high brittle piercing sound. It is pretty much undesirable in the trade. This is a poor example because the nail is too round; what is going to happen with that is you are going to there is a lot of surface area against the string and that’s going to cause a lot of string noise and it’s going to cause a very dark tone as the string actually spends more time on the nail as it goes through. This is just a poor example because it’s got the really bad corners and things like that; you’re just never going to be able to get a good tone out of that. These are good examples of the way that a lot of player’s nails are shaped. Mine are shaped somewhere in between these two and this is very popular amongst a lot of the pros. What is good about this is you’ve got this nice flat edge here which means you are going to move across the string very rapidly; you’re going to have a very nice well pronounced tone; you’re not going to get much string noise and you’re going to have a nice spot for preparation when you are actually playing the note. This one’s popular for you’re A nail which is the nail here. They go P, I, M and A; and this is because on the A nail you usually end up playing your melodies and with this arch here it actually helps bring out the melody because the string will rapidly move through that creating a very bright, crisp, clear sound. There’s a lot to this art and it takes a lot of experience so you just want to kind of use trial and error and figure out what works best for you.

Fingernail Shaping on Classical Guitar

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