When I first started playing guitar, everybody I know played finger-style. No picks. Then I ran into someone, a jazz guitarist, who tried to persuade me to use one. I messed with it for a while and discovered that I couldn't really play what I wanted to play using a pick. Among other things, I felt like I was trying to tap-dance with combat boots on.

Now, I know there are guitarists who work wonders with them, but once I got into classical guitar, I never gave it another thought.

I grow my picks on the ends of my right-hand fingers.

Once in a music store, the clerk, a young woman who, it turned out had been taking guitar lessons for years (pop, jazz, country) seemed to be unaware that one could play a guitar without using a pick and could do things that you couldn't do with one.

What brought all this out was that someone had put a Carlos Montoya record on the turntable, and she stood there with her mouth open and her eyes bugged out. "My God!" she said, "What amazing pick work!!"

I tried to explain to her that Montoya didn't use a pick, he used his fingers. I got the impression she thought I was unhinged! Might as well try to drive a car with no wheels on it!

The tremolo passages (one does the basic tremolo unit by playing thumb on a bass string followed by ring, middle, and index fingers on a treble string, all played very fast and smooth—takes lots of practice!) she was convinced had to be multiple dub, like the stuff Les Paul did. But no. I'd seen Montoya in person, and was in the first row watching Segovia play Tàrrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra (here by Pepe Romero), and there wasn't a pick in sight!

Don Firth