Percussive Fingerstyle Guitar through the Lens of NIME: an Interview Study

Percussive fingerstyle is a playing technique adopted by many contemporary acoustic guitarists, and it has grown substantially in popularity over the last decade. Its foundations lie in the use of the guitar's body for percussive lines, and in the extended range given by the novel use of altered tunings. There are very few formal accounts of percussive fingerstyle, therefore, we devised an interview study to investigate its approach to composition, performance and musical experimentation. Our aim was to gain insight into the technique from a gesture-based point of view, observe whether modern fingerstyle shares similarities to the approaches in NIME practice and investigate possible avenues for guitar augmentations inspired by the percussive technique. We conducted an inductive thematic analysis on the transcribed interviews: our findings highlight the participants' material-based approach to musical interaction and we present a three-zone model of the most common percussive gestures on the guitar's body. Furthermore, we examine current trends in Digital Musical Instruments, especially in guitar augmentation, and we discuss possible future directions in augmented guitars in light of the interviewees' perspectives.