I find I’m wearing down my index finger nail when playing, anyone got any ideas about protecting it? Nice red nail polish? Superglue?
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Justin Sandercoe suggests fake nails for people who have nail wear issues from playing a lot of fingerstyle, but I imagine they could be protective for any scenario with nail wear. Personally, I’d try to adjust my technique to not rub my nail so much, but I can appreciate that you might be reluctant to go that route.
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Generally my nail doesn’t touch, it does enough to see wear tho
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If you are using mini picks, try switching to bigger picks maybe.
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I’ve recently changed my grip from an evh style to a gypsy jazz style. The strong downward slant is whats making my nail touch the strings. I probably just need more control. Maybe a fake nail might help tho
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“Control” is kind of vauge - what does that even mean? Edit: Sorry to be clear, not criticizing your description! I just feel like we’ve grown so accustomed to not knowing how things work that our first reaction is usually only a guess that doesn’t really tell us anything. For me.
Anyway, when I do this, there is only a minor amount of contact, and only at the very end of the nail, and only sometimes. It’s a combination of the grip and the arm position. You can look at any of our clips for the arm position I use when I’m in dwps mode.
For the grip, a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s the grip I use most commonly. It’s the “angle pad” grip we have talked about. Here are both sides of it:
Here’s an alternative I sometimes also use. This is a “pad side” grip, where the pick is on the side of the index farther down. We discuss how to do this grip very specifically in the “Crosspicking With The Wrist” lesson, which you can check out. Here again are both sides of it:
The arm position that matches these grips is different, so again, I’d refer to platform clips for that. But generally I can do dwps with both of these. In the case of angle pad, there is minor fingernail contact but only occasionally. When done right, you won’t be tearing up the nail.
The pad-side grip has no nail contact at all. This is generally done with a more pronated arm, and no fingers resting on the body - either loose fist, or in the air, as in both of these recent clips:
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I hold it using the hooked finger, side of finger. I say control as due to recently switching my muscles have not had long to adapt and I find myself letting my hand fall a bit to far into the strings and hitting the nail.
This is pretty much it, minor contact occasionally. I would post pics but it’s a pain in the ass atm to get them on pc.
I feel I should put more effort into my post with your detailed reply troy lol, thank you.
I Will try get something up at some point 
But I must say troy, with the Dwps concepts, I wasn’t to bothered about it when I was playing with the cross picking style, it was a whatever type thing as cross picking already had all those movements included. Yet I was still very much getting trapped in fast passages like in spanish fly.
But this change to true gypsy jazz style has really highlighted the benefits. I’m just not getting stuck anymore and can slap the fuck out of the strings with little accuracy loss.
It’s like revolver ocelot reloading his new six shooters in metal gear 3, “it’s a revolution”.
I feel the downstrokes on most string changes really knocks home all your video work on this.
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