Fingernails, Finger Patterns, Peak Moments

You can tell a lot about a person from looking at their hands. When I was a child, I bit my nails. It was a nervous habit, and a common one for a youngster. But there are many people who still bite their nails, as a habit, coping mechanism, or a way to relieve stress. When I visited my grandparents, I saw my grandfather’s nails. Years of biting them had whittled them down to tiny nubs, and my mother mentioned to me, “That’s what happens when you bite your nails.” Soon after I stopped biting my nails, as young Matt wanted to have all of his body parts in tact when he got older.

Likewise, my girlfriend Amanda also bit her nails as a child, and learned a lesson about nail biting from her grandfather. Apparently, when she was little, she spent a weekend at her grandparents’ house. When her parents got back to pick her up, she was sitting on the porch with her grandfather, chewing her nails with her grandfather for the first time, sitting in his lap.

Once I stopped biting my nails, they grew back in full force. Soon I had to clip them once a week, something that I hadn’t had to do before. When I began playing guitar as a teenager, I had to clip them more frequently. In order to press down on the fretboard, your chord hand needs to have short nails. I began to learn guitar, using a pick in my left (strumming) hand, and chording on the right. For years I played guitar with a pick, which began to limit my guitar playing to a certain extent. Instead of feeling the natural rhythms of the song, I was using a small piece of plastic in between two fingers, while the other hand had the privilege of direct contact with the guitar. After playing on my own for quite some time, I decided to attempt some fingerpicking. I grew out the fingernails again on my left hand, and used them as my pick, after seeing a picture of Bob Dylan with long nails on one hand. Once I dropped the pick, I felt like I reached a new peak in my performing. Now I felt like there was a new height which gave me much more control of the rhythms of the songs.

Music, like most other things, is a series of peaks and plateaus, as if you were climbing a mountain. There will be a time when you feel like you are flattening out for a stretch, and not really progressing. But if you think about things a different way, like dropping the pick, then all of a sudden, you have a leap up the mountain, going to the next peak in your performance.

I had another jump to the next peak in my guitar playing this past winter, after playing a quiet set at a local coffeehouse. I had been in the process of various things, including a move, and hadn’t been playing out as much as I had been in the recent past. This was the first three hour show I had played in a few months, and I was starting to show signs of fatigue by the third set. An older regular stopped me after the set and offered his advice. “Let me show you something. I can always tell when someone does this or doesn’t by the way they play the guitar.”

He proceeded to show me a finger exercise technique that I had learned back when I was first starting out on guitar taking lessons in junior high school. Back then I kinda brushed off the boring practice techniques in favor of first learning basic chord and rhythm techniques, and then stopping lessons to create my own songs. But he showed me these basic patterns, and I remembered them, although I hadn’t really practiced them much prior. After the show, I tried them out the next day. It was difficult at first, although I kept at it for the next few days. After a while, I had become much more dexterous on the fretting/chordal hand, and it was my “peak moment” where I had taken it to the next level.

Tags: fingernails, memories of relatives, peaks and plateau, practice