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 So you decided that life wasn't challenging enough trying to stand out amongst players of one of the most popular instruments of the modern age, and decided you would pit your wits against a million child prodigies instead. If you've only been exposed to classical music through movies and popular culture you'd be forgiven for believing that every single piece of classical guitar music sounds like Green sleeves*. The history of the guitar relates it back to Lyres and harps of ancient history, and it traces a route into Europe from Arabia through North Africa into Spain, so there's a large Spanish tilt towards the instrument which broadens as the music evolved. A bit like History is just cool stories with dates attached, classical guitar spans half a millennia and you can always find something exciting or to your taste from any of them. * Green sleeves may be a reference to a whore or promiscuous woman, since green was associated in Elizabethan England with scootly-poopin'. 16th C: Renaissance At this point the guitar was still evolving, from four to six strings and with a flat back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97ZfeO8NT4g 17th C: Baroque This period has a really specific sound in northern europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrvkYrR9ChQ And more similar to ongoing traditions in the south: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pycGBe_lsY8 18th C: Classical While never achieving the same heights as instruments such as the violin or cello in northern European canon, at this point the instrument has a large following and Berlin, London and Paris form hubs of the instrument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6mJ5G5mxvg 19th C: Romantic Classical Guitar extends to the new world in Latin America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urvMmkHmujE 20th C: Modern https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5bazerN2SE 21st C: Contemporary Like Jazz, Classical music can be pidgeon-holed to a specific date and time, but there are new pieces being composed constantly which push the boundaries further. To quote Mark Levine: Western Music is a story of the gradual acceptance of dissonance:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J29k1LtHq9M  Guitar Instruments appear to follow a typical you-get-what-you-pay-for model. Yamaha, Cordoba, La Mancha, etc. are highly lauded for beginner and intermediate models, there's almost no price ceiling for more expensive custom built guitars. It has been strongly suggested that cutaways, built-in electronics, pickups, thin bodies, crazy paintjobs and odd materials are traps for unwary and unfamiliar buyers. Yamaha C40: http://www.thomann.de/gb/yamaha_c40_konzertgitarre.htm La Mancha Zafiro SN: http://www.thomann.de/gb/la_mancha_zafiro_s_sn.htm Cordoba C7: http://www.thomann.de/gb/cordoba_c7.htm Footstand You put your foot here - because typically songs are memorised if you get to the point you're performing them for people, the issue becomes one of fine motor control and adjustments on your fretting hand, whereas your plucking hand benefits from a more relaxed wrist angle. This means, your guitar is higher on your body and the neck is up in your biznis like you're Dave Mustaine farting through a solo:  Music Stand I sit at a computer stool like a heathen, but even so I have a floor standing holder for my books. The little hands to keep pages open where you want them is no-joke a-mazing.  GET A TEACHER FOR AT LEAST A COUPLE OF LESSONS Yes, technically you can fumble through without one in the same way you can learn the violin by watching blurry VHS tapes but frankly having a professional tweak your positioning and show you physically any differences you should enact you gain alot more. I even straight up told the dude I was learning from this was going to be a one-time thing and he was more than happy to give me a number of suggestions for self-study. Books For general learning I personally have experience with Frederick Noad Solo Guitar Playing and have found it so far to be an amazing book. Sagreras has been highly lauded in the same thread also. For improving technique Pumping Nylon is reviewed very highly. For repertoire, someone will have to tell me because I'm not there yet. Updates If anyone has any suggested links or content, or corrections please let me know.
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Nov 6, 2015 17:06
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I was considering a C7 myself but then I realised I have this horrible habit of paying for high quality gear when I'm definitely a low quality player - so opted for a Yamaha CG122.Luna posted:Greensleeves is great because you learn a classical standard and a christmas song at the same time. I had this experience while learning to play bass and sheet music to some extent: it felt more like muscle memory for a particular pattern than artistic expression. I'm still not entirely comfortable with how to approach that, but as a solo musician I feel empowered to work within the confines of the piece with arpeggiation, slurring and variations in volume and tempo. Having said that, none of that is coming to the fore until the piece is basically rote memorised, but I don't think THAT particular barrier is unique to classical repertoire over any other kind.
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Nov 7, 2015 01:17
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^I too cannot see it - try 'clyp.it' ? My latest challenge is a lute piece called 'Dowe Son Quei Fieri Occhi' in the Noad book - I'm finally getting it down but it's got bundles of those super weird chord grips. It seems that lutenists freaking love chords which have upper notes played on guitar first and third strings i.e. F on fourth string, C on third string and A on first string. It does sound immense though. There's a preceding flamenco section which makes me a really sad panda because it's clearly meant to be super fast and I play it like a lumbering brute.
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Nov 8, 2015 16:19
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Some great natural reverb there. I'm really such an amateur that I can't provide and meaningful critique, but I enjoyed how fluid everything sounded with no fits and starts to the tempo.
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Nov 10, 2015 10:46
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^ Yeah sure, does anyone else have recommendations? This is the whoreson of a song I'm working on now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVhwBLoCm-4
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Nov 11, 2015 23:27
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Barnyard Protein posted:that song is beautiful. do you have sheet music for it that you could share? is it in a book somewhere? Sure, how's the legality though? I guess the music itself must be public domain so I can I just take a snap of my book?
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Nov 12, 2015 12:25
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Barnyard Protein posted:Not asking for Yeah, P 133 if you have a scanned copy or something. I'm just about getting it after many days of on-and-off practise. It's really interesting seeing the motifs and patterns come out audibly after seeing them on the paper, especially the middle section of this song. I should be able to playtest my CG122MS tomorrow! I know that I could have gone with a 162 or even 192, but frankly I'm sick of buying above my price bracket and feeling like an idiot.
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Nov 12, 2015 22:14
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, is it in that book Frederick Noad Solo Guitar Playing?
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What are those philosophical links? I'm sure it'd be appreciated for people lurking and I'd like to see it too. For me, music in the classical genre (i.e. >100y old) allows me to connect on an emotional level with the minds of humanity from ages past. These people lived in radically different worlds to us, in different countries and walks of life, with problems and issues all of their own. Being able to play and hear the same melody that someone in the 17th century also did gives that communion. I'm probably not the best person to ask to get excited about alot of traditional classical music: I personally think that it spreads across so much of time with so many individual subgenres to try to take it in at once. I know the differences are more pronounced recently than in preceding centuries, but imagine if everyone bulked together indie/folk/rock/blues/country/metal as '20th Century guitar music' ? Because of it's vastness, a great help for me has been to focus narrowly, arbitrarily. I can credit Murakami (the fiction author) for getting me excited about the music; so I started with Haydn and Janacek - that worked, so checked out Chopin and Liszt by extension - I quickly found I enjoyed pieces with a dissonance tension and so that's where I'm at now.
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Nov 13, 2015 12:17
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So you players who've passed the beginner-book stage, from where do you get your music? For example, my father often needs a little hint about what to get me for Xmas so I was thinking of suggesting a book of sheet music for Classical Guitar, but I'm not even really sure where to start to suggest something!
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Nov 16, 2015 12:49
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It's not a huge problem for me - you're right that it is a stretch though. I'm looking at the shape in the way I see a 9 chord with a fifth string root i.e. x7677x or x7577x - this just happens to be x7477 with a missed string. That fifth string being muted gives you leeway with reaching with your second finger since it doesn't need to worry about clearing it. This isn't really something I'm working on, surprisingly I'm a little above this level - but it forms part of the ABRSM Level 1 grade so I thought I'd give it a shot:  The song is composed sometime around the end of the thirteenth century, written about concretely in the 1350's by a prominent Parisian author. To put that into perspective of my previous digression about 'living in another world', this song was composed and played at roughly the same time as : The Magna Carta was being signed, Ghengis Khan became king of the Mongols, Islam is thought to be founded.
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Nov 16, 2015 15:54
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Pyrthas posted:I don't play classical, so I'm just poking my head in here, but I wanted to add: when I first tried this, I also thought of it as an E9 or Em9 without a 3 (or a root), but it could also just be a Bm. Yeah, maybe the second inversion of an E9sus2 ?
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Nov 16, 2015 16:38
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Classical music theory is like the pariah of modern study AFAIK. I used musictheory.net to get the basics and then Mark Levin's Jazz Theory book to pummel it into me. The latter is obviously modern and fairly advanced but almost every section on modes or substitutions has sections on how 'XXX is the classical way of doing things, YYY is how would typically be done before Jazz, and ZZZ is how it is utilised now' which is a nice slice of the cake. If anyone has any specific recommendations I'd be glad to hear them but realistically how useful is it other than to chew the cud over, as we're clearly not composing the pieces?
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Nov 16, 2015 18:16
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If you're looking for general theory knowledge that site is pretty good - it really depends on your end goal IMO and playing classical doesn't particularly get easier if you know the theory compared to say Jazz where it's a fundamental requirement. I have personally found diatonic scale construction: chord construction: chord substitutions: to be invaluable in my overall repertoire but other than key signature I would find it difficult to tell you about most of the sheet music I am playing or even if it's relevant.
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Nov 17, 2015 00:37
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By Bossa Nova, do you mean like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sr7BXinJMw Because frankly Classical theory isn't going to be much use at all except MAYBE the vestigial requirement to read sheet music?
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Nov 17, 2015 10:53
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Trig Discipline posted:Glad to help! Jobim is basically the epitome of everything I love about bossa nova; harmonically dense and yet so incredibly beautiful and accessible. It's one thing to string together a bunch of really weirded-out chords that sound like weirded-out chords. It's another thing entirely to put them together in such a way that the listener feels that they had to be stuck together in just that way, and imho nobody does that better than Jobim. Do you have an example?
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Nov 27, 2015 20:43
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Amazing stuff. I have a technique question - in Italiana each bar basically has a repeating bass pattern of open E, open A, open D - they aren't dotted or slurred on the notation. Do I just let that poo poo ring out? I'm playing it slower than the video below so it sounds muddy as fudge, but I don't know if that's just because I'm playing old-man speed instead of normal speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BLnPXouvTI
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Nov 28, 2015 21:56
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Right, so I'm plucking with my thumb and then muting with the meat next to my thumbnail as I go to pluck the next string?
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Nov 28, 2015 23:47
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Thanks! It's actually easier playing a little faster because my thumb naturally dampens the bass string adjacent. I have a request: it would be good to get some example sheet music in the OP that we can use to illustrate different technical levels and styles. I would be excited to read any suggestions - being blinkered into the Noad book is making it hard for me to branch out and find stuff, even roughly appropriate for my level to illustrate to others.
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Nov 29, 2015 12:24
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Afaik those rests on the bass notes are because effectively it's being portrayed as two separate instruments - it would be bad practise to just float that quarter note in the third beat without anything else around it. aFAIK each note should only ring out for the given time of its note length.
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Dec 2, 2015 08:46
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Gosh, I can't wait until I get my classical at Christmas, I've all but given up trying to play on my jazzbox for now. However, my biggest guffaw was just now - I've been working on 'Italiana' and I couldn't figure out why it sounded so strange, and it wasn't until I clicked the description of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdqYwG9K5Ro As well as '6th string to D' written above the notation. I figured 'hey, this must mean I should use the sixth string D instead of on the fifth or fourth. No, it means it's effectively Drop D tuning and I've been playing it wrong the whole time. This is not the first time this has happened: key signatures, time signatures. I really need to work on absorbing the parameters of a piece before I dive in because I've been playing it wrong for maybe 2 weeks?
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Dec 10, 2015 10:11
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Good question actually, since Classicals don't have truss rods normally, right?
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Dec 15, 2015 21:09
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Got a Yamaha cg122ms and boy howdy playing with proper posture is hard as fudge. I also have to re learn how to sight read properly 
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Dec 31, 2015 18:48
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Really a question of posture - I'm happy with pretty much all the techniques although like most concert instruments I guess I could benefit from fine tuning. I sit up straight with one foot tucked under and the other on the footstool, but I guess I slip down. Typically I have good posture and sit up straight most off the time anyway - ms be something specific to how I play the classical because I can play guitar and bass for hours
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Jan 5, 2016 20:38
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Can I just say: gently caress the Harmonious Blacksmith. It wouildn't be so bad if there weren't crazy diads every bar but NOOOO. loving Handel.
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Jan 12, 2016 09:58
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What is the learning process for sheet music chords? I'm starting to recognise a few mainly through inference (i.e. bass note and key signature) but as above it's getting really tiresome to see a page that is wall-to-wall chords of inversions and suspensions.
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Jan 14, 2016 22:46
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I enjoyed playing that first piece, thanks 
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Feb 3, 2016 21:29
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Page 152/252 of Classical Guitar Method: two pages of an etude which could literally be described as Bm Finger Pattern A G Maj Finger Pattern A C maj Finger Pattern B x8 Some of the stuff is amazing, I'm talking the lute transcriptions - but I look at this and think to myself: what the gently caress is this doing? is it really the best way to annotate this music?
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Feb 10, 2016 07:42
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Man, I've never felt more like I'm going to spike myself in the eye with an errant string than when I tried restringing my classical for the first time - so far no punctures and my knots are holding. I used this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx1IG93sEs4
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Feb 19, 2016 22:13
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:51 |
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Well after today, I am going to take a serious hiatus from classical guitar - I'm about 2/3 of the way through this Noad book and literally 90% of the poo poo I have to deal with is figuring out positioning and fingering, - A, G, A, E, G, F, E -> DF, CE, BD, BbD are the notes and they're as easy as poo poo to read, the tempo is fine - but it's this nonsense juxtaposition of the matrix-nature of fingerboards and the linear nature of music notation that is driving me insane. I have played the keyboard literally about 2 hours in my life and I can play this whole thing without a hiccup because of the layout of the keys, and yet after multiple years of playing the instrument, decent sight reading and musical theory knowledge - I am hamstrung with nothing but rote memorisation to fall back on.
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Feb 28, 2016 12:19
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