Leo Kottke: “Fingerpicks Just Aren’t Necessary”

Our 1987 “Guitar Player” Interview

While an editor at Guitar Player magazine in the mid-1980s, I came up with the idea of asking famous players to send me one of their guitar picks. (We eventually published three fold-out poster displays of these picks.) I was surprised when one of the musicians I contacted, world-class fingerpicker Leo Kottke, sent me a note instead: “I don’t use picks. When a nail breaks, I have it repaired with acrylic.”

A few weeks later, Guitar Player magazine’s sister publication, Frets, published a Leo Kottke cover story in its May 1987 issue. In the interview, Kottke, who was known for using a thumbpick and fingerpicks, described how his right arms and fingers suddenly froze during a concert. Physicians diagnosed the issue as tendinitis, likely caused by his use of fingerpicks on his right hand. “If I could start my career over again,” Kottke added, “I would never get involved with fingerpicks. They just plain aren’t necessary.” I knew other guitarists who had problems with tendinitis, so I asked Leo for more details. Here is that conversation.

I just read in Frets that you wish you’d never started using fingerpicks. What’s led you to that conclusion?

Basically because it was so hard to get away from ’em once I had started. Also, they caused me some problems. I developed tendinitis after a few years, and started playing a lot harder than I needed to. There’s something about, at least for me, wearing fingerpicks that allows you to go over your muscle threshold. Your wind up having a lot of hysteresis. You know, if you’re accelerating an engine real hard and then suddenly just take your foot all the way off the gas and put it in neutral, all that force has to go somewhere, and it basically goes into bending the parts in the engine. The same thing happened to my arm. It took me quite a while to recover from that.

Did the symptoms come on gradually?

It was gradual in the sense that I was getting warnings—you know, pains here and there. I was playing one night in Denver, and my hand and my arm just froze. It was as though each finger had to push a refrigerator out of the way before I could get to the string. It was really bad. Took a long time to get away from that. And it happens to a lot of players who don’t use picks, also. It can happen because you’re doing very repetitive things in a small arena with the same muscles for that many years. Something is usually going to give. I know a lot of players who’ve had the same problems, and fingerpicks are a good, quick way to get there.

What were the compensations you had to make once you gave up using picks?

In the beginning I had to settle for having just a fraction of the punch that I used to have. But that’s only in the beginning. After a while your punch comes back. You just learn how to balance differently, and that’s what saves your arm. You begin to use less force and more balance to get the same amount of power.

Did you have to change the types of strings you were using?

No. I am using a lighter string than when I first started to play, but that’s just because I find that I have a little better luck with sound systems, pickups, and microphones with a slightly thinner string. I used to use a .013 to a .056 medium-gauge set, and I’m .054 on the bottom now. I still have a .013 high E, but now it’s a .016 instead of a .017 for the B, a .024 instead of a .026 on the G, and so on.

Why do you use such a heavy high E?

I just like it. It has more body than a .012. To my ears, a .012 is a little too thin. But then again, it depends on the guitar too. Some guitars sound fine with them. But with most of the guitars that are around these days, there’s so much wood in there that to my ears I need at least a medium gauge on the E.

Have you noticed that you can do some things fingerstyle that you can’t do with picks?

Oh, yeah. Absolutely! There are more advantages to playing without them than there are disadvantages. The obvious ones are that you can use the backs of your fingers, and you can use your all sorts of surfaces on either side of your thumb or fingers that are unavailable to you with picks. I can get a much better rhythmic sense without picks.

If you were to take a movie of your attack without a pick, the string actually goes across the finger, so in effect you’re bowing the string when you don’t use picks. It produces a much more appealing note. The note itself has a niftier sound, and you have all that time while the string is going across your finger to color it or to work on it. And also you have all that time to release it at the right moment. You have more time in general without picks to do what you have to do. With picks, it’s just that instant, that one point of hitting it and going past the string.

To compensate for the lack of tone without picks, did you find you had to reposition your right hand—maybe play closer to the bridge?

No. You actually wind up playing further from the bridge and more towards the hole, because you can use a looser part of the string without going out of pitch. You just have so much more control. It’s another feature. You can play up and down those strings, where with picks it doesn’t pay off quite as much.

My position did change. I had to change it in terms of my tendinitis—exactly what generated what was kind of hard to determine for me. But overall, without the picks my position became much less contorted. I had much less wasted motion and more time to pay attention to the music. One of the most important things—and it took me a long time to learn it—was that I had to use much less fingernail than I thought. Nowadays I have almost no fingernail involved in the playing.

Do you keep it longer on the thumb?

It tends to be longer, just because I don’t use it much. My playing with my thumb comes mainly off the side. I’m using a callus that I’ve built up there.

Do you sometimes squeeze your index finger and thumb together, like a flatpick?

Yeah. I tend to do that any time I’m making a single-note run.

Did you used to wear fingerpicks on all of your fingers?

No, just the thumb, first, and second finger.

Did you use your ring and little finger for picking as well?

Yeah. Not my little finger, but I use my ring finger.

Has that changed since you quit using picks?

No.

Did you do any exercises to help you get past your tendinitis?

Yeah, I did a few that seemed to help, just stuff I found that felt good. One was to lay my hand flat on a tabletop, and then independently tuck each finger under back toward the palm and then bring them out again. I just did it for a few seconds, and that helped quite a lot. There was a kind of release that I’d get right away from it. Fortunately, I haven’t had any problems with tendinitis now for quite a while now.

Did you abandon all the picks at once?

No. I started out by dumping the fingerpicks. By playing without anything, I literally just couldn’t get a sound. Things were pretty much the same when I took off the fingerpicks and kept the thumbpick. I slowly went to thinner and thinner thumbpicks, and then in Australia I finally got up the nerve to throw out the thumbpick—and that’s the hard part! Getting rid of that thumbpick.

When you abandon the thumbpick, everything changes. It feels literally impossible, and it’s a terrible, terrible thing to have to go through. That’s why I wish I’d never started with them. But even before that, I had made several albums where I didn’t use picks. While I continued to use picks onstage, I could record without them, depending on the piece. In the studio you don’t have that urge to rip into the guitar that you have onstage. I always have the feeling onstage that force equals projection, which is an illusion and not true. But it’s very hard to shake that onstage. I always find myself using a little more power there than I do in the studio. So in the studio I would take the picks off frequently, depending on the tune. Also in the studio you also don’t have to play for an hour-and-a-half solid, so you don’t start noticing blister problems or nail fraying, that kind of thing.

It’s kind of a problem for a lot of people—whether to use picks or not, or whether to use a thumbpick or not. There are tons of people, like David Lindley, for example, who play absolutely beautifully with picks. But I really, really like to feel the strings. It’s a great pleasure to be able to just grab hold with your digits and play. I don’t have to worry anymore about losing them. My arms behave a lot better, and it’s more fun for me.

Thanks, Leo! This is exactly what I’m looking for.

Thanks for talking to me.

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For more on fingerstyle acoustic guitar:

Bert Jansch Talks About Blues and Playing Acoustic Guitar (Audio)

John Renbourn: Our Complete 1978 “Guitar Player” Interview (Audio)

Blind Blake’s Best Recording Session

Mississippi John Hurt: Beloved Bluesman and Songster

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