Hello,

first things first: thanks for the great course material, Kai!

I'm currently doing the Beginner Course and I'm on Lesson 4 - Part 5 where we learn the Escobilla Arpeggio. I'm having the issue that when I'm planting my I, M, A fingers on the G, B, E strings and pluck them, the string gets muted by the planted finger on top of them. So I pluck the E string and because I pluck towards the fist/hand, the nail of the finger on the B string makes contact with it and mutes it with a buzzing sound.

Is there anything in particular I could look out for to prevent this? I've tried moving my hand position a bit but I've yet to come to a point where it really works for me.

Hi Florian,
I think what you want to play around with is really your entire hand position here. If your arm is more parallel to the strings than perpendicular, and you nails are therefore at an angle of say 45 degrees, then part of the nail has a pretty good chance of coming in contact with the adjacent string. As your hand position moves closer to perpendicular, the nail actually gets out of the way, so that you shouldn't have this problem anymore. Does that make any sense? If not just email me and I'll ask you to send me a little video so I can see if there's something specific I think you could change.
-Kai

Hello Kai,

thank you for your fast reply. It totally makes sense and that's what I've been trying out yesterday. Generally I had less issues when approaching a more perpendicular position as you said. It also became worse when my thumb had to rest on anything below the A string (like in this arpeggio) because I had to bend the fingers more to keep them planted.

I do have a relatively long forearm and fingers as well, so whenever I try to mimic the position of other players I feel the need to raise my right arm and shoulder a bit so I don't have to angle my hand too much to arrive at a perpendicular position that isn't too low either. My arm still rests on the guitar body then, but only around the arm bend. I don't know if that is considered bad technique though, because it might create extra tension in the arm and shoulder?

Edit: I experimented a bit with it. So it's definitely not just my angle but also how high I position my hand. If it's higher, I have no issues with muted strings. I need to pull my arm up a little for that, but it also prevents me making a very bent "claw" shape, so it gives the strings more room to vibrate.

Edit #2: After testing around some more, it might actually be more comfortable for me to play in classical guitar position instead and I saw videos of Sabicas doing that as well. Is that something you would suggest to avoid for Flamenco? It's how I always played the electric guitar as well.