Investigating various plucking techniques in classical guitar playing

Martina Schäffer (Ebenfurth, Austria) and Antoine Chaigne (Buc, France)

Abstract: This musical-acoustical study starts with the master’s thesis by Martina Schäffer, concert guitarist and pedagogue near Vienna (Austria). Based on both the literature on guitar playing and personal experience, she was able to identify more than 40 different plucks grouped into 3 standard categories: Apoyando (17 plucks), Tirando (14 plucks) and Thumb plucking (10 plucks). For each pluck, she described in detail the motion of the finger (each phalanx), wrist and forearm, and the string-finger interaction.
All series of plucks are recorded in the same conditions (player, guitar, room, microphone, plucking position,…) and analyzed in terms of amplitude, spectral centroid, attack sharpness and temporal envelope. The goal here is to determine whether these different plucks lead to noticeable differences in the resulting sounds.
The analysis shows that the 17 Apoyando variable plucks significant differ from each other in terms of spectral centroid and attack sharpness, while the 10 variable Thumb plucking are mostly discriminated by their attack sharpness only. For these two categories, a comparison with series of identical plucks (Apo13 and Thumb5, respectively) exhibit significantly smaller differences than for the variable plucks, which suggests that the variable plucks are well controlled by the player.
Finally, the analysis of the 14 Tirando plucks show a smaller range of variation of the parameters compared to both the Apoyando and Thumb series. Moreover, the comparison with a series of identical Tirando plucks (TIR6) yield a comparable range of variation of the analysis parameters.
This tends to show here that the player has less control for reproducing Tirando plucks compared to the two other playing techniques.
At the end of the talk, the main results and limits of the present study will be discussed, and some perspectives for future work will be given.

‼️ Le séminaire peut être suivi en ligne via le lien : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/81984994806?pwd=4V0kim9Bw6NTbEw92mAwDg5cl0wLBf.1

Le mardi 17 novembre 2026 à 11h00 / Amphithéâtre François Canac, LMA

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