This is a compendium of fingernail techniques, with 100 exercises, studies and arrangements to encourage players and students to learn and use the gestures from the Robert ap Huw manuscript, along with a few other useful ones.

This book will also be of interest to anyone who is intrigued with the music of the Robert ap Huw manuscript, as each of the gestures on p35 of the manuscript are explained and described. These gestures, or fingering movements, are of course essential to play the pieces from the ms, but are also very useful to players of any harp, especially as ways to play decorations and ornamentation in both early and traditional music. They work really well when playing Scottish pipe tunes on the gut-strung harp to clean up the sound and give crisp articulation to the tunes.

Techniques:
Basic skills : damping and placing, Thumb choke, Short plait, Break, Thumb slide, Practising gestures with both hands. 
Half scratch, Forked Choke, Sliding the 4th finger, Back hop, ‘dirrum’, Bee’s plait, Little finger plait, Great plait, Beat, Four finger plait, Double choke, Double plait, Back of the nail, Finger Fling, Thumb wrinkle, Finger shake, Single Scratch, Double Scratch, Leap, Decorated Scales, Some piping-style decorations, The coupled hands approach

Studies:
The Gentle Fall of Rain, Both Hands Now, Magnus the Elk (strathspey), The Beekeeper’s Reel, Oldshoremore (slow air), Harp Beat, The Beekeeper’s Reel part B, The Leap Year

Tunes:
Humpty Dumpty’s Reel, Off the Wall (reel), Honey on my Porridge (march) - wire arr. / gut arr, The Rhymer’s March - wire/bray arr. / gut arr, The Lights of Cluanie, Thug mi gaol do’n fhear bhan, Cumha h-Irteach.