Sound Wave Nail Art: Remarkable Personalized Designs You'll Love
Sound wave nail art tells a story in a way that no other nail design does. It can transform a voice or a favorite song into wearable visual patterns. Imagine wearing a baby’s laugh or wedding vows or Christmas carols on your fingertips! Sound wave nails are the perfect personal expression for anyone seeking a one-of-a-kind manicure. Read on to discover how to create sound wave nail art.
Sound Wave Nail Art
Music Nails with Waveforms
Add more depth to music nails with soundwaves. Beyond music notes and instruments, you can add colorful acoustic patterns like you’d see on an equalizer display. It doesn’t even have to be a real song – simply drawing the squiggly lines creates the impression of music and motion. Here the artist used a rainbow of colors in a beautiful gradient for the waveforms.
Did you know the least expensive way to expand your polish collection for a project like this? It’s Pat Pat Gel Palettes where each set has nine coordinated shades, and each color is intensely pigmented. They are ideal for ombre designs and painting intricate details that you only want to go over once. Just a little Pat Pat Gel goes a long way.
LAVIS Pat Pat Gel - Ombre Gel Palette - Painting Gel
But what if you wanted to make the patterns actually represent the tune you’ve had on repeat this week? The first step is to see the music that you’ve been listening to. The good news is you’re spoiled for choices. For example, on the PC, there’s a free app called Audacity that can take any audio file or live recording and show you a visual display of the waveforms. If you’re using your phone, there are music visualizer, audio editor, or DJ apps that provide a similar service.
Here’s an example of what Audacity can show you:
The top part of the image shows the waveform, and the bottom shows the spectrogram of an audio file. It’s the same information in two different styles. Obviously, the waveform would be simpler to draw on nails, but the spectrogram would be stunning!
Quick Overview of Sound Waves
In case you’re unfamiliar with the science of sound, here’s a quick explanation. Sound waves are vibrations and waveforms are a visual graph revealing how loud the sound waves are and how often they change pitch up or down. Tall waves mean louder sounds; soft sounds make shorter waves. Peaks that are close together are higher pitched, but lower pitched if they are spaced far apart. Clapping your hands creates sharp peaks and will look different on a waveform visualizer than singing a melody would.
If you’re looking at a spectrogram, it’s harder to pick out what’s going on because it’s a three-dimensional representation. Colors that reach higher on the graph mean higher pitches, and colors that are brighter mean louder tones.
How to Turn Soundwaves into Nail Art
At the time of writing, we found several businesses online that will turn a song into art that you can hang on your wall. They use apps like Audacity to visualize the sound, then print a design based on the waveforms. What’s amazing is that some of these prints can be played back with an app, so you can turn the visual image of the waveforms back into music. Imagine if you could do that with a manicure!
Where would you even start? We suggest getting a set of soft gel tips or recycling an old set of press-on nails and using gel products instead of lacquer. This set up will give you a relaxed way to work on a design.
The next step is to “see” the audio file you want to turn into nail art.
Soft Gel Tips
Visualize the Audio
Let’s choose a song and turn it into nail art. How about the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: bam bam bam bam!
Hold up, you’re saying, that’s a lot of detail to draw! How is that supposed to fit on nails?
You’d be absolutely correct to point this out. It’s even more complicated because the recording shows the waveforms for multiple instruments playing at the same time. It’s really hard to even pick out the opening bars just from looking at the graph.
What’s the solution? Is soundwave nail art really possible?
The answer is still yes. There’s an easy way and a more challenging method. The easy way is to print custom nail stickers with soundwave nail art. It saves a lot of time!
The hardcore way is to paint those waveforms! What if you were really good at painting intricate nail art and found clients who want a unique look like this? What would it be worth? It wouldn’t even have to be the entire audio file but just a few notes.
Still, if it seems like a lot of trouble to do soundwave nail art, we can respect that. Here an artist used soundwaves as part of ombre nail art. The abstract pattern hints at the original musical inspiration but doesn’t try to be exact.
Equalizer Nails
There are all sorts of ways to do soundwave nail art and many of them are easily recognizable. We want the music enthusiasts to have lots of ideas to try!
But let’s get back to soundwave nail designs. You could start with something simple like a single sound growing louder and then fading. It would look something like this textured gold design.
Tools for Creating Soundwave Nails
Speaking of gold textured nails, have you seen A’DOR Beauty Mirror Spider Gel? Anyone who’s into nail art or loves sparkle, needs to try this addictive product. It’s sticky, so it stays exactly where you place it. It’s also stretchy so you can easily make thick or thin lines.
A'DOR Mirror Spider Gels
It also helps to have a dotting pen and precision brushes to draw sound waves. Products like LAVIS line art gel come with skinny brushes in the bottle, but if you’re anything like us, we always want extra brushes handy.
The best tool we’ve found for staying ready and organized is LAVIS Brush Cleaner. It has a special bottle top that dispenses just enough to clean the bristles right on top of the bottle. Then you can just wipe and get back to work drawing waveforms.
LAVIS Brush Cleaner Gel 100ml
Conclusion
Soundwave nail art may not overwhelm your feeds this year, but there will always be a niche for it. It has the potential to be an incredibly personalized look. It can also be just for fun!
Find the supplies you need for soundwave nails and all the other projects you want to explore in our store. Enjoy sales, free shipping, and even more exclusive discounts in our rewards program.