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This thread! I'm so glad it got rebooted and that I finally found it (read: finally looked for it). My life is classical guitar, so I've got too much to say to fit into posts, but I'll try to stay around and answer whatever questions I have time for. At the moment, my group Mobius Trio is gearing up to go play at the International Guitar Research Centre's Festival March 18-23(ish) in Surrey, UK. Should be a blast - we'll get to hang out with our rad buds Steve Goss and Tilman Hoppstock and hopefully maaaaaybe meet John Williams and/or Bream. It's probably unlikely that either will happen, but a dude can hope! I'm also contemplating playing the Falletta Concerto Competition in June, so I'm working my Concerto Elgiaco chops back up to speed and learning Roberto Gerhard's Fantasia, the set piece. It's pretty fun having all this motivation to practice well, which is a surprisingly hard thing to have as a professional. I spend so much time teaching, rehearsing, running the 501c3 side of Mobius, and trying to have a life that I rarely have time for good practice. So far, this competition is awesome for making that time, though. I hope I at least pass the pre-screen...
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Jan 23, 2016 23:34
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Honj Steak posted:Oh wow, I didn't know about this thread, cool! Thanks! I'm listening now, and you sound great. Excellent tone and phrasing in the Prelude. I feel like it's fashionable to take it faster these days, but that often sounds hurried to me. I'll have to listen more, but I'm curious about what you're thinking about with the tempo relationships between the movements. By my clock, the Fugue feels like it's dragging a LITTLE bit. It's closer, but it's about 5-10 bpm slower than the Prelude, and my ear definitely notices. I mean, it's certainly not mandatory for the Prelude and Fugue to be the same tempo, but I feel like this suite really works when they are about the same. The movement of the subdivisions from 3-2-4-6 over the course of the piece becomes really striking when the pulse remains somewhat steady. I like the tempo in the Allegro, though! Sounds good. You obviously don't have to say, but I am really curious to know with whom you study. As I alluded to in my last post, we visited Tilman Hoppstock and his students in Darmstadt last year, and we had a blast. We also stopped in Frankfurt and hung with Christopher Brandt and his students. Germany is really one of the guitar epicenters these days. Y'all with your super high right wrists (not a criticism - I'm moving in that direction myself) and super nuanced, unflashy interpretations. I'm digging the scene there. I have a buddy in Hanover, too, and Frank's whole thing there seems cool, too. I hope to make it out there more frequently! Tell your Also, what kind of guitar is that?
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Jan 26, 2016 23:10
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I hope you like it and if you have any comments or suggestions I would be glad to hear them!
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Honj Steak posted:Thank you a thousand times for your quick and comprehensive answer! Yeah, I'm still unsure about the tempi in the piece and especially in the Fugue and in the Allegro I'm still feeling a bit uncomfortable because the piece is quite new. I tried to push the tempo a bit after a few bars, but then I fell back into the original tempo, which was maybe the right decision for that performance. In the end I want to play the fugue faster of course, also playing it so that the Prelude and the Allegro are about the same time to keep the overall symmetry of the piece. Re: Bach - of course. Those are hard movements to speed up, so I totally understand. I believe I did a masterclass with Prof. Müller-Pering in around 2002, when I was but a young student at the Koblenz Festival (back in the DAY). He and Hubert Käppel really helped fix many of the rhythms when I was playing Elogio de la Danza, and I am eternally grateful. Pretty rad to also get lessons with Gallén - you're very lucky. It's interesting to hear about the general German guitar scene, as an outsider. I had been thinking about trying to do my Masters in Europe after my undergrad and some conversations with some European former teachers of mine, but in the end, moving from the American system to any of the European ones seemed too daunting and opaque. That and the fact that I REALLY wanted to study with Sergio Assad. In the end, I'm quite satisfied with the decisions I made (Mobius would not exist without Sergio and David Tanenbaum and SFCM), but there's always the "what if?". Now I just have to satisfy my wanderlust and Europhilia by booking tours over there. And San Francisco is really NOT so bad, outside of the skyrocketing cost of living.
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Jan 27, 2016 01:26
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I also had masterclasses with Tilman, of course. With the Frankfurt guys I have a lot to do, too, but Hanover is unexplicably a bit cut off from the rest and you don't get to hear much from there. Of course I know Bungarten, though. There are 24 Music Universities and a few conservatories in Germany, though, so the scene is already big enough to get a bit confusing sometimes and then there are of course also some places outside Germany (like Vienna, Salzburg, Basel or Barcelona) that are guitarwise better connected to Weimar than some of the German schools. The guitar is a double top spruce made by Nicolaus Wollf who is a luthier based near Frankfurt.
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https://www.instagram.com/p/BBlXeaQMoYe/?taken-by=firebad57 Been doing lots of super relaxed practice lately, which I think has been pretty helpful. Obviously, the playing is a bit (very) flat when I do it, but I'm trying to help my body learn the fact that musicality does NOT equal body tension.It's been pretty helpful, so far.
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Feb 10, 2016 00:39
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Jazz Marimba posted:I play acoustic guitar (I'm primarily a drummer though) and really like fingerstyle, so I grew my nails out and started shaping them. My problem is with my thumbnail...I can't figure out a shape that works, and it always breaks. What do I need to change to be satisfied with my thumbnail? The breaking thing is a whole topic unto itself - how does it break, usually? A huge part of having guitar nails is being inconveniently careful about them, but it's also possible it's a thin/brittle/weak nail, in which case there are various products/strategies that people use. I myself use Onymyrrhe, which is apparently no longer made, so I guess I'll be switching to some sort of Hoof Strengthener when it runs out soon. As for shape, this is a hard thing to describe in text. Basically, it's important to find the place on the nail where the string contacts it (usually after first hitting the flesh), and the angle at which it hits. Then, you can take a straight metal file and, holding it at the same angle to the Point of Contact, file until the whole surface of the nail is flush to the file. Again, near impossible to describe in text, but it's an awesome strategy for finding a good nail shape. I'm sure there are YouTube videos demonstrating it, so hopefully someone can find and post one. I just picked up this bad boy: https://www.discogs.com/Julian-Bream-Britten-Henze-Martin-Brindle-Villa-Lobos-20th-Century-Guitar/master/425614 at the record store, and good lord do I just continue to love Julian Bream more than any other guitarist ever. He created almost all of this rep, my favorite for the instrument, and he plays it SO loving MUSICALLY AAAAAAHHHH. I'm currently learning/playing the Roberto Gerhard Fantasia for this competition (my first in many years, and my first international one), so I'll have to make a scratch recording of that soon.
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Feb 22, 2016 01:15
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https://www.facebook.com/mobiustrio/videos/1075783792487850/ Made a little single-take version of our Ravel arrangement for this competition application. It's rougher than I'd like, but that's what we get for suddenly trying to record a piece we haven't been rehearsing! Bringing this little ditty to the International Guitar Research Centre's festival next month, so if any of y'all are in the London/Surrey area, you should come the hell out.
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Feb 27, 2016 20:28
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Barnyard Protein posted:Wow, thats beautiful. Congrats! Who made your guitars? I noticed all three have similar unique features. They were built by Benz Tschannen, a Swiss builder who lives in Nevada. Despite being a man of age and dignity, he's kind of a "young" (hasn't built many guitars yet) new-school luthier. These guitars are really interesting - 22 frets, BOLT ON NECK(with truss rod!), elevated fretboard, spruce/cedar double top, etc.. They're really great, and they match incredibly well, since we had him built them all at the same time of exactly the same woods (Rob's is darker varnish because he NEEDS to be different, and Mason's is an extended-range 7 string). I love Benz. Sometimes he comes to my house when he's in SF, and we cook meat/veggies that he raised/grew on his NV farm.
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Feb 27, 2016 23:35
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Kilometers Davis posted:firebad what do you genuinely think about the current state of classical guitar as a living. Performing or teaching. Is it viable nowadays in a realistic way? Dense question but I've been curious about this for a while, same with a ton of other cg questions I've had in my head for months. This is such a big question that it's taking me forever to think about it. I think making a living as a classical guitarist is a totally possibe/viable thing to do these days, since I know plenty of people who do it. Of course, I also know plenty of people who went to school for it who are doing other things now, too. It's certainly not a super easy/profitable path. So far, Mobius Trio has been doing great in terms of going places and playing shows, and I'm pretty happy with our success, but I don't know many other folks from our generation who are doing the same. Of course, I know a few people who are getting their name out there, but it's a pretty crazy hustle. In one of my last lessons of my Masters degree, my teacher Sergio Assad told me that when he and his brother were coming up in the late 60s/early 70s, there were maybe a dozen really GREAT guitarists out there, so you could make a living by just being awesome at classical guitar. Now he says there are literally hundreds and thousands out there who are that good (and nobody buys records anymore), so what the gently caress are YOU going to do to stand out?? Of course, I was again lucky to have Mobius, which exists in a unique niche, so we kind of had that question answered. That's part of my answer - it's viable, but it's a grind and you have to love it. Also, I did this recording for a pre-screen today. It truly is unedited, as I'm sure you can tell: https://soundcloud.com/matt-linder/roberto-gerhard-fantasia
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Mar 4, 2016 23:56
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http://www.metalsucks.net/2016/05/20/exclusive-premiere-chopin-prelude-in-e-minor-performed-as-a-black-metal-song/ Look, Mom, we're on MetalSucks, doing a silly thing that a friend somehow convinced us to do. It's so fun to finally have YouTube commenters making GBS threads on something we put out - normally we don't get enough views for that.
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May 21, 2016 02:33
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