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When I mostly played old Nationals with 16s I went to the effort of getting comfortable with fingerpicks. It only takes a couple of weeks of focused practice. I still keep my hand in with them (no pun intended) because it’s very useful to have the ability to double your acoustic volume at will.
Where's the biggest ones found?
*An Official Foo-Approved guitarist since Sept 2023.
I think I first saw that in a @michaelwatts YT video.
Definitely produced the best tone for me.
I personally could never get the hang of using fingerpicks.
I can't help about the shape I'm in, I can't sing I ain't pretty and my legs are thin
But don't ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to
Thumb/finger picks sound almost as good, but I have never managed to get used to them. If you can play with them, they would be a good compromise.
Lastly, flesh sounds crap by comparison in my opinion. But playing mostly flatpick on acoustic these days flesh is what I resort to using in my brief forays into fingerpicking for the reasons above.
like some of you, not the strongest (diet really makes a difference) but I keep them filed, regularly, like a couple of times a week - helps smooth the edges and avoid those "snags" that can lead to total "tear off"
QED
just because you do, doesn't mean you should.
I hold my hand out, palm towards face, and tilt the fingers a tiny bit towards me, and the nails should just about show
that works for me, the third finger nail has 3 times the thickness of the other to reach that point, so it's a good way to judge it.
Find out what works for you
Personally I think fingerpicks sound awful on a good acoustic, unless it's amplified anyway and you can EQ it all OK again
I do use a flatpick plectrum on an Adirondack top dread, that sounds amazing
I Imagine that we all have our different views on tone quality. It is most common to regard nails as the best, but fingerpicks and flesh both get wide support as well. There are many great players who use flesh and get fantastic tone. Examples that come straight to mind are Mark Knopfler, Tommy Emmanuel, Lloyd Spiegel, and George Thorogood, but there are many, many others. Michael Watts, who posts here now and then, gets wonderful tone with flesh.
Obviously there are different skills at work (different players are good at extracting good tone with different methods) but I think there is another factor at work: We select and set up our instruments to sound right with the techniques we ourselves use.
When, for example, I look at guitars in a shop, I don't strum them with a plectrum or pluck them with fingerpicks, I play with my fingers - and I only consider buying guitars that sound good played that way. Later on, when a guitar comes home, it gets tweaked with setup adjustments and especially with different strings. I keep on tweaking until I have it sounding the way I want it. And all of that process, from instrument selection in the shop right through to the brand of strings I use, is informed by my preferred technique. If I was a fingerpicker, I'd probably buy a different guitar, and almost certainly use a different type of string.
I used my own example just now, but we all do much the same. Electric players have an even larger set of tweaks to make - all the choices that an acoustic player makes, plus all the things you can do with amps and speakers and pedals and electronics.
My point here is that in the quest for tone, we naturally adjust many other things and eventually tend to paint ourselves into corners. Once you get a technique that works for you, and have adjusted fully to it, it is very difficult to change.
just because you do, doesn't mean you should.