Back-of-nail tone

Tannin

My name is Tannin and I have a problem. (Long question. Sorry.) 

I play fingerstyle, both bare fleash and nails. I have naturally weak nails so once a fortnight I go to a nail salon and have then painted with the usual compound. I don't know the proper terms for this. 

I started with the little glue-on plastic extensions, coated in varnish, dipped in silicone(?) powder, re-coated, re-dipped a few times. I didn't like that so much: I found that the hard silicone layer and the plastic fake nail underneath it and the real nail underneath both tended to seperate after a few days, producing an unpleasant double-note tone. (Imagine holding two plectrums at the same time. Something like that.)

Then I switched to just having the paint and powder, skipping the little glue-on plastic bit. Much better! No nasty double notes, and the compound sticks well to my natural nails and lasts longer. 

Bit by bit, I let my nails get ever so gradually longer so now I can play with just flesh, just nail, or any desired combination. At the same time, I went from having one nail done to two, to three, and now I do four (thumb as well), leaving only my little finger natural. (I don't generally pick with the little finger.) I've gone from playing with a pick, to finger and thumb, to two fingers and thumb, to all except the little finger. All good.

The problem. Tone with the back of the nail. Back before I started getting my nails done, strumming a downstroke with the back of my natural nail produced an excellent tone - even better than a nice plectrum. A painted nail, however, has a dull thud sort of a sound. To start with I just used a different (unpainted) nail to strum. The tone difference was obvious. 

Unpainted nail >> sounds better than a plectrum >> sounds better than a painted nail.

Now I only have painted nails and although everything else about the present arrangement is great, I miss that beautiful tone on strummed chords. (I play fingerstyle and mostly pluck chords if I'm not playing single notes, but strummed chords are an important part of it too.)

Note that tone on plucked notes is fine, it's only the back of the nail that sounds poor. My working theory is that the nail compound is not a good "plectrum" material. Plucked notes are fine because they are mostly made by the real nail underneath (the painted reinforcement only keeps it stiff and helps it last). But strummed notes with the back of the nail sound thuddy and boxy. 

Is there a better material to use on my nails than whatever it is nail salons normally use? (Different lacquer or different filler or both.) Or is there something I can top-coat one nail with for better strumming sound? Or is there some other cause? Note that I get good tone from back-of-nail strumming with any of my threee large fingers if they have bare natural nails.

Sorry again for the long question.

PS: I play acoustic steel-string, if that makes a difference.

Cirrus

I don't have an answer for you at all, but I'm interested nonetheless because I recently discovered that I love that back-of-nail sound on electric guitar, raking chords etc. So I understand where you're coming from!

What is the deal with having naturally weak nails? It it something that a dietary change might help with?

Tannin

I believe it can help at the margins, Cirrus, but only to a degree, and I have a pretty good diet already. Some people have stronger nails than other people. Fact of life. I guess it's a bit like hair - some people have coarse, wiry hair, others have fine soft hair. (And some of us have grey hair, but that's a different question!) 

However that may be, I play for several hours a day (it's become a bit of an obsession this last year or so) and no natural nail is going to stand up to that sort of wear. I find that with the tough artificial  coating, my nails grow at almost exactly the same rate as I wear them down. They don't get any shorter, and I only file them for shape, seldom length.

(How does the old adage go? "I started playing guitar as a teenager because I though it would help me get girls. Now I talk to other middle-aged men about having our nails done.")

Roland

Been somewhere similar. I don’t have a full solution, but this might help.

For a while I used nail hardener to reinforce my nails. The surface had a soft plastic feel, with none of the friction that you get from a nail. I tried roughening the surface with 400 grit Emery paper. However it didn’t work too well. For the nail hardener to work it has to retain some plasticity. If it were too solid then it would become brittle and chip off. After that I tried using a single layer of tissue paper. First apply hardener and let it dry, then glue of the paper with a second coat, followed by a final coat. The edges can be filed once dry. The paper adds roughness to the nail surface when strumming, but can wear quickly. It can be kept in reasonable condition by touching up the edge with hardener after playing.

The next move would have been to use nail protection mesh rather than tissue paper. However I didn’t get that far because I joined a band where the music needed lots of downstrokes, and I changed over to using a plectrum 100% of the time. 

As I get older nail hardening becomes more important, so I’ll be interested to see what your solution is.

DavidRees

jelly and ice cream works for me ...

Roland

... and gelatine based sweets.

Tannin

Revisiting this twelve months on. It is still a live issue for me, but I have grown used to it. One key change which has helped a great deal is simply playing more gently. 

(To a large extent this has been forced on me for other reasons. I have had some nasty repetitive-use muscular injuries in my left arm. I've dealt with them by a combination of reducing my daily playing hours, migrating gradually to lighter strings, limiting my use of the more muscular guitars (12-string and long-scale baritone), and being aware of the particular left-hand actions which cause most of the trouble - big stretches with wiggly bits, mostly.)

I'm still not getting the tone I'd get with an unpainted nail, but much closer these days. 

For some reason I read Roland's paper method with considerable interest, and then forgot all about it. That might have been around the time when I had to take several weeks off playing with my strain injury.

(Ahem. What is a "big stretch with wiggly bits"? It's where you play a stretchy chord across a few frets and then do stuff in the middle of it. For example, switching between an A sus2 and a straight A  played x 0 7 4 5 x and 5x 0 7 6 5 x, hammering on and pulling off with your ring finger on the G string while holding the others in place. That did horrible things to my arm when I went at it like a bull at a gate last year. Now that I'm sneaking up on it a few repetitions at a time, it's OK. But - damn it! - in the old days before I started injuring myself I'd have mastered it in no time just by doing it over and over and over while I looked out the window and watched the ducks swim around.)

BillDL

I used to use Roland's tissue paper trick to reinforce my nails.  It was before you could get all this fancy acrylic stuff, so I just roughened my nails with fine sandpaper, applied clear nail varnish, slid a pre-cut single layer of tissue paper on while it was wet, and gave it another couple of coats of nail varnish after it dried.  When I refer to tissue paper I am not referring to Kleenex nose wiping tissues or toilet paper, I'm talking about the slightly stiffer craft tissue paper that as I kid I used to cover the framework of balsa wood model planes with and lacquer it to shrink and harden it.  My nails at that time were probably about 4mm beyond the tips of my fingers and thumb.

The reason I stopped doing this was after I "stubbed" my fingernail on something like a door frame.  The hardened shell that was stuck firmly to my nail didn't bend backwards and break at the edges of the quick as would happen with a natural long nail, it tore the nail upwards out of its bed and it was agony with lots of blood.  It took a long time for the nail to die off and new growth to generate a decent nail.