If Your Nails are Too Long for Playing Guitar:
Your sound will be brittle, and weak. And your nails will break more easily
If Your Nails are Too Short for Playing Guitar:
You'll have too much flesh which will hit the strings and cause poor or inconsistent contact between your nails and the strings, this will give you a weaker softer sound.
Just the Right Nail Length for Playing Guitar:
With the right length you'll have a strong sound that projects easily. The tone will be smooth and mellow (depending on your attack) and full. You'll also be less likely to break a nail.
So What's The Right Length?
You'll want to clip and or file your nails down so that when you hold your hand in front of your face with your palm facing you, you can just barely see the top tips of your nails over the top of your finger tips. Yeah, it's that easy, and there's no need to go longer. You need just enough nail to make consistent contact with the string without the strike being all flesh.
A Few Maintenance Tips :
- Buy a few nail clippers and keep them around. Put one on your key chain, put one in the car, leave one at work, and leave one in your shower or bathroom. The point of this is that anywhere you are that you realize you need to clip your nails (I mean who sits around and watches them grow) you'll have some clippers right on hand and you can take care of it immediately. Don't let your nails grow too long, they will break!
- Use new or sharpened nail clippers so you don't crack or stress a nail.
- Once you clip your nails the edges will be rough and this will make the sound of your nail hitting the string scratchy and more brittle then it needs to be. To fix this just take a few moments to rub the newly clipped or filed edge of your nails on your pants, jeans or whatever fabric you have around to polish the edges and smooth them out. If you have a nail product made for polishing, more power to you.
