[Brent Hutto]

Eventually I'm going to raise the action on the guitar I recently acquired as my "flatpicking guitar". The previous owner had it set up for fingerstyle, although a bit higher than my own fingerstyle guitar. The unwound strings are set pretty darned low, though, and the B-string in particular buzzes when strummed and sometimes during more melodic-style flatpick. So it has to be raise at some point.

But in the mean while the thought occurred that Tony Rice, for instance, run really low fingerstyle-type action on his guitars and I never hear buzzes or rattles when he flatpicks. Then again, he has a rather idiosyncratic right-hand technique and he has made the comment that his guitars would not work for most people without buzzing. So my idea was that while I'm learning to flatpick maybe leaving the action low would help me develop some touch and control instead of just hitting the strings as hard as I can with my preferred heavy pick.

So how low can you go and still flatpick without constant problems with fret rattles and buzzes? I'm not talking about strumming, as far as I can tell hard strumming is going to require higher action than flatpicking lead and solo lines.

Does anyone around here use action as low as 0.070" on the treble side?

Or even 0.075"?

Tony Rice for instance uses 0.072" on the high-E and 0.091" on the low-E on his famous "Clarence White" D-28.

I've been practicing with my 1st and 2nd strings still well under 0.070" using a 1.4mm pick and most of the time there are no buzzes but I can't play totally clean. And I do have to play at 80% volume, if I really dig in the B-string will buzz almost every time. As expected, the problem is that even a single strummed 5-string or 6-string chord at normal volume will set the B-string to zinging on the frets every time. But for actual flatpicking even super low action seems to work OK.