GUEST: Touche, I suppose, but there can't be that many barefingered steel players ~ I've never noticed one, ever. But then again, I'm not primarily a country-music listener.

Grab: Over many years, I've developed a technique of strumming with my picks on, down with the thumb and up with the two fingers. When playing/practicing without picks, I'll go both directions with my fingers (probably more downstrokes than up, in fact, in order to "brush" across the strings with the backs of my fingernails). Somehow, my neural synapses manage to control those two fingers appropriately according to whether or not they are armed with picks ~ I can easily and unconsciously restrict the fingers to upstrokes with picks, but leave them free to go both ways without. (My thumb, in contrast, works in one direction only ~ down ~ with or without a thumbpick.)

For the record, my first guitar was a nylon-string classical type; I learned to pick barehanded, and continued to play without picks of any kind for five-plus years until I upgraded to my current Martin D-18 in 1969. I then felt it absolutely necessary to start using a pick, or picks, because even the best steel-string acoustic, when fingerpicked au natural, simply can't match the volume of a classical guitar.

For a while, I fooled with flatpicks as well as fingerpicks, but after I began streetsinging for long hours, I quit the flatpick because of cramps in my thumb from gripping too hard. (Yeah, I know, I probably could have developed better technique and learned to flatpick correctly, but that was then...) Whereas I had previously divided my repertoire into "fingerpicking" and "strumming" categories, I gradually learned to play all my songs wearing the thumb-and-fingerpicks, even those for which I had no single-string picking arrangement, and for which I employed a multi-string, high-volume approach (i.e., "strumming" with fingerpicks).

It has taken many additional years, but at this late date I have developed a right-hand technique that allows me to attack any number of strings at once, one or two or even all six, at any time, with the thumb or with either finger, and keep a steady pulse gong with the thumb while enjoying a degree of freedom to play melody, or grace notes, or "comping" chords, or whatever, with the other two fingers. Pretty much what I wanted to do all along ~ but certainly NOT anything I was able to do as a beginner, or even as an "intermediate" player.