Notes on playing guitar

I seldom use picks. I've tried them all—flat picks, fingerpicks, thumb picks—and have felt comfortable using them all at one point or another, but over time I've come to rely mainly on my fingernails. Of course I like the tone that picks produce and the playing speed they enable, but I prefer the feel of fingernails.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend the use of fingernails to anyone else. I bit my fingernails habitually until I was 25 years old, and I think my biting habit distorted the trajectory of my nails' growth. They grow strong and long now but separate from the flesh at a shorter nail length than most people's do. I'm not sure if that's an advantage or a disadvantage.

I strum with the nail of my index finger, which I reinforce by resting my thumb on the outside edge of it, at the highest joint. My down strum feels and sounds purer than my up strum. On the up strum I catch the strings with a bit of my fingertip, which diminishes the quality of the sound and also curbs my strumming speed somewhat. These problems are not deal-breakers, but they're a drag on my enthusiasm for strumming.

I'm mainly a fingerpicker. What is known as Travis picking is the basis of my repertoire. About 75 percent of what I do is derived from Merle Travis's technique of playing bass notes on the beat with the thumb and melody or filler notes with the fingers, either pinching with the thumb on the beat or picking independently between beats.

I play with two fingers, index and middle. It seems to me that as time passes I'm coming to rely less on the middle finger, however. On a lot of songs nowadays I often use only my thumb and index finger.

There are three circumstances in which one really should pick with two fingers: 1) when one needs to play multiple treble notes simultaneously to achieve a harmony; 2) when one needs to play treble notes on different strings in very quick succession; and 3) all the time, to keep one's two-finger playing skills honed for circumstances 1 and 2.

Some people pick with three or four fingers, and there are moments when I myself would like to use three fingers, so as to pluck a full chord with my fingers. But as a general rule, picking with more than two fingers isn't worth the added complexity in my opinion.

When fingerpicking I always rest the tip of my pinky on the face of my guitar, near the sound hole. This little trick I picked up from Happy Traum, creator of the guitar instruction materials I used when I was first learning to play. My pinky so positioned stabilizes my hand, fixes the distances I have to reach to apply fingertips to strings. My playing would suffer a great deal if I were to let the fingertip of my pinky come unmoored from the guitar face.

My guitar playing is far from improvisational. It's based on repeatable patterns. I occasionally will play a run with my thumb. I cannot play a long melodic line with my thumb without breaking my rhythm, though. I'm somewhat freer to explore melodies on the treble strings. I usually can manage the skeleton of the melody on the top three strings without hampering my rhythm too badly—and without practicing until I'm blue in the face.

My goal as a fingerstyle guitarist is to be solid, in time and in tune, picking a rhythm that can be sung over or played over by abler instrumentalists. I think of myself as a fingerstyle rhythm guitarist. Even if I were playing a loud, fast song with a band, I would be inclined to fingerpick rather than strum because fingerpicking chords is an almost effortless exercise once you get the hang of it.

I play acoustic guitar. I've never owned an electric, though my acoustic, a Taylor 412-CE, is equipped with a Fishman pickup. I've owned the 412-CE since late 1999. It's the only guitar I own, and for all practical purposes it's the only instrument I've played in the 21st century.