I went searching for the identity of the classical guitarist I heard with the ping pong ball story. This is not an amateur doing it to make up for poor fingernail care, but pro doing it in *addition* to.

Surprised the heck out of me to discover tons of web pages on the topic. Here's how you, too, can glue bits of ping pong balls to your fingernails: http://fly.hiwaay.net/~marklong/class/ping.htm