TUNING UP
Nail It! BY SHAWN HAMMOND
If you’re bored enough to read or care even a modicum about what I say here
on a semi-regular basis, you
may recall that I’ve evangelized about celebrating your
uniqueness [“Fly Your Freak
Flag High,” September 2011],
shaking off the chains of preciosity [“Banishing Gollum (or
Discovering Your Inner Punk),”
August 2011] and simplifying
your rig to get more sounds
with your hands [“To Stomp,
or Not to Stomp,” November
2011]. In retrospect, I guess
all those diatribes have highlighted various facets of a general curmudgeonliness that’s
coming over me as I get older.
Naturally, I think it’s a healthy
crustiness, but you may have a
more unbiased viewpoint.
Anyway, one of the drawbacks I’ve encountered in my
general move toward more
hands-on elicitation of primal
rawness in my playing is that …
well, I was busting nails.
Yeah, you read right. Nails.
The problem began three or
four years ago, when I switched
string gauges to get a tougher,
tauter sound and tamp down
on the string warble I got when
I dug in for heavy riffs. Moving
up to .011s fixed the problem,
but soon a couple of other evolu-
tions in my approach changed
everything again. First, thinking
about the range of sounds that
Jeff Beck and Brian Setzer—two
of my favorite players—get with
hardly any gear inspired me to
decrease my stomp-able distrac-
tions and try to wring more
sounds from my bare hands.
Soon after that, I acquired
an amp whose unadulterated
tones were so bloody titillating
that I felt less need to augment
them—an amp that enabled me
to dial in a single sound and
either play light as a feather for
glorious clean tones, or attack
ferociously for nasty, in-your-face
sounds. More recently, I’ve taken
to flipping around my heavy,
textured-grip nylon picks to get
even more bristling tones out
of my axes—which sometimes
unconsciously spurs me to ram
my picking hand into the strings
even harder. I know, I know …
my inner punk is out of control.
Although not indestructible, my nail treatment lasts through a whole week
and a long band jam, puts my sound literally at my fingertips, and isn’t
annoyingly distracting. Here, my nails had gotten a tad too long and ripped
near the end of a long band rehearsal, but half of what you see is two layers of topcoat—imagine the damage if they’d been unprotected!
those teenage years of listening
to Eddie Van Halen and Eric
Johnson. But there’s been a
pretty significant drawback for
the keratin plates at the end of
my picking hand’s index, middle, and ring fingers: They’ve
not increased their gauges one
iota to keep up! And the result
isn’t pretty. More importantly,
it does not feel good. If you’ve
ever had a nail detach, you
know what I mean. It doesn’t
even have to come off that
much for your finger to scream
every time you touch a string.
I’ve known for years, of
course, that hardcore fingerstyle
guitarists have pretty drastic fin-
gernail-care regimens—routines
out, we already had everything
I needed. My loverwoman just
had to sit me down and teach
me how to do my nails.
sacrifice the sounds I’m totally
digging, or figure something else
out. Given PG’s slogan—“The
relentless pursuit of tone”—I
think you can guess which I
chose. But as I thought of how to
avoid pain and still get my sound,
I had to come to terms with the
fact that I’m either too vain or too
lazy to put that kind of time and
money into something I know
will bug the living hell out of me
every second I’m not playing.
Yeah, I like it au naturel, baby.
So I showed my wife my
owies, told her about freako fingerstylists’ nails, and asked for
help figuring out a solution that
wouldn’t feel weird, take forever, and cost too much. Turns
Shawn Hammond
shawn@premierguitar.com
8 PREMIER GUITAR JUNE 2012
premierguitar.com
