Nail clippers for classical guitar nails: Is it that bad?

Fingernails are, in essence, a tool for guitarists to play their instruments. Imagine it as a bow for violin, fingernails are in direct contact with guitar strings, thus maintaining the contact areas smooth and in suitable shapes is vital. How well you did the manicure can profoundly influence your tone. Although not all players have the same fingernails (in terms of shapes, compositions, therefore hardness, softness, elasticity; in fact, not even all fingernails on the same hand are the same), we guitarists seem to use a universal method on how to maintain the best fingernails: filing with sandpapers.

Not just any sandpaper commonly used in construction to sand walls which tend to be below 300 grit, the appropriate papers are smoother in texture, allowing a cleaner final finish, and sometimes even polish the nails. The papers I usually use are 2000 and 5000 grit, and they are doing a really good job thus far. The more I file, the some regions may even be finer than 7000 grit!

Why sandpapers

The process of filing the nails is tedious most of the times; it usually takes me no less than 20 minutes to get to the desirable lengths after two weeks of not filing. As much as I want to get a great tone afterwards, I have to admit that I hate filing nails. The sound of the nails attacking the sandpaper is not particularly a beautiful sound, sometimes fork against plate, let alone an enjoyable one. Nevertheless, the final result is rewarding: a set of nails that can produce a whole range of quality tones, usable in two weeks, and the cycle repeats.

There are a few reasons why almost all guitarists adopt this method, depite its laborious process:

Continuous changes: By filing, your fingernails and fingertips continuously experience that string-hand feeling, resulting in a less awkward playing post-manicure.
No accidental cuts: We will talk about this drawback of the nail clipper later on, but reasonably saying, filing the nails makes room for errors and amendments.
If you watch the video on nail filing by Thomas Viloteau, the technique can even produce nails that are tailored to you playing style.

The notorious nail clipper

Nail clippers have a bad reputation in nail care and tone production in classical guitar world. The fact that nail clippers attack the nails so aggressively and brutally is the main reason why they are not widely used. One mistake, one bad cut, and that nail may be useless for a whole week. In conclusion, nail clippers are bad, or are they though?

It is undoubtedly nail clippers are hard and finicky to use, but not impossible. Imagine you have been away from your guitar for more than three weeks without filing or cutting your nails, now it is quite long. You decided to play the guitar again, but you want to get to the routine as quick as possible, and filing would waste nearly half an hour of your practice. In this case, which happens to me many times, a nail clipper would be the way to go, but it is not that simple!

The process

I left my nails uncut for nearly a month. The tone was not ugly, but my nails would produce a scratchy sound if I did not mute the strings with my fingertips first (this topic would be intersting enough for another time), as we play with both the nails and the flesh almost at the same time. The longer the nail is, the harder it gets to reach the flesh. Maybe it was the time for nail care.

Believe it or not, nail clipper for me is not that hard to use. Be maindful that if you ever consider to get one, be sure that the edges are sharp, so that it cut smoothly through the nails without creating any collateral damages. Try to work slowly bit by bit, make a nice curve (NOT straight, imagine drawing a circle using as many lines as possible), from one outer edge of the nail, to the middle, and to the other edge of the nail. Do not worry about it making the nail rough during this part, since we can adjust it later.

My fingernails after a rough cut. Notice that the result is a quite rounded-end tip, and the lengths of the nails are significantly shorter compared to pre-cutting.

Now we are back to our good ol' sandpaper to file out any unwanted bits and to smooth the surface of the nails. It is crucial to file the bottom of the nails, where the nails make contact with the strings. I used a high-grit paper to do so. After a few minutes, the nails should be just as good as filing alone!

My fingernails after filing. The shape of each nails is now more defined and refined. Do not worry about the tilted wedges, it is just my playing style.

What to know

I do not encourage the use of nail clipper, nor I disprove its use. This article is mainly to neutralize the hatred toward nail clippers. There are a few things to remember when trying out this method:

Understand your playing style and overall nail shape: The fact that we sort of cut your nail blind is the reason why we should know about our playing style and nail shape already. Try to learn about your optimal length, shape (to which side it's tilted), nail hardness, how your nails response to the cut, etc.
There will be a dramatic change: This is the whole purpose of using the clipper. By reducing the time to manually file the nail, we cut it straight to the desirable length and only file the excess. When we jump right back to the guitar, it may feel awkward as first, but you should get the momentum quite quickly.
Practice makes perfect.

In conclusion

Nail clipper can be intimidating to many people. However, I have demonstrated here that this can be a viable method to get to the appropriate nail shape quickly, without having to compromise the tone quality.