New answers tagged acoustic-guitar
1
I too suffer from the effects of using a finger for strumming and flat picking. I use a fingernail polish strengthener, not polish. Apply two coats and let it dry for a whole day. It stands up for about a week, the other option my wife had me do was go to the manicure place with her. She had them build me an acrylic finger nail, like one of those french ...
0
This looks like a good spot to mention flatwounds (again and again). You can slip and slide with no squeeks! <rant> All that extra top-end is just noise harmonics anyway, siphoning energy from the fundamental </rant>
On an acoustic, you can go a little-bit lighter on the gauge without too much loss of power. 12s are the "standard" for ...
4
For increased bending you have three solutions:
Change to nylon strings - this will cause all sorts of changes in the setup of your guitar, and will sound very different, but you will be able to bend much higher
Downtune the guitar - lower tension = easier bending
Improve your bending technique. I can get 5 or 6 semitones on the 7 th fret on my G-string, ...
4
You might have to change a bit the way you're strumming the strings.
As you're only playing on the bottom 3 strings, you should focus on your strumming hand in order to reduce your movement, maybe you go too far. This is not a "full chord" strumming, you should stop your movement sooner in order to avoid touching the 3 string you don't want to play.
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5
Bending and sliding are two different things.
For slides, by which I'm assuming you're talking about sliding a note up and down a string with your finger and not a glass or metal "slide", you want to be able to move the note without generating too much of the annoying string noise you can get. For that, using coated strings to lubricate the sliding a little ...
2
You can press strings 4,5 and 6 with finger 1, and mute strings 1,2 and 3 with finger 3 or finger 4 (about 2 frets up from finger 1)
4
With the electric guitar, I make the power chords using just the index finger to press the 6th, 5th and 4th strings. With the rest of your index finger you can mute the top three strings, and you still have the other fingers to add more notes if you ever need them.
It might be a little more difficult doing that on an acoustic guitar because of the string ...
3
By using your middle, ring and little finger on 6th, 5th and 4th strings respectively, you can still use the index finger to mute the top three strings.Try it and let me know.
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