William's guitar blog

Adam Rafferty: This is how I practice guitar

2012-01-20T09:35:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my friend Anton Emery, I just read fingerstyle guitarist Adam Rafferty's nice blog post about how he practices guitar, in which he says:

When I practice, I do it for the love of doing it. I play my scales every day with attention to “form”, relaxation, groove and tone. I run my repertoire for the delicacy and delight of playing with a deep satisfying rhythmic pocket and fingers that perfectly “touch” the strings.
I plod along, day by day – and will do so for my whole life. Day in, day out. That’s what I do. I practice for the love of practicing itself – with no result in mind. This is how I practice guitar.

I have to agree. For me, the learning and experience is the key. Some days I really enjoy solving problems and developing my understanding, and some days I can just sit there for a half hour and just work on smoothing out one small aspect of technique. I find it more satisfying to accomplish one substantial thing than to try to chip away at a whole bunch of things.

Holiday break recordings

2012-01-03T07:52:00.000-08:00

I recorded three videos last week during the holiday break. Having a full-time job again and students in the evenings, I haven't had enough practice time to maintain any repertoire. However, I've found that spending an hour in front of the camera is one of the best and quickest ways to improve my playing.

All three pieces are fantasia-type pieces (as opposed to dance movements) from the renaissance era. I just can't get enough of this kind of music. The first is one from Frederick Noad's "The Renaissance Guitar" book. I recorded a few takes of this one on the day after xmas but was unhappy with them. I left them alone for the night and listened again the next day, and decided to feel the piece differently.

It's written primarily as half-notes with a few sections of quarter notes. I was unhappy with it when I played it all at a sort of measured pace, so I decided to treat the quarter note sections as written-out ornaments rather than part of the melody.

The second piece was a fantasia by Francesco Da Milano from an old book called "Lautenmusik aus der Renaissance." It's the first piece in the book. I more or less used the fingerings in the book, which were for standard guitar tuning. I'd like to try it again sometime with F# lute tuning, partly because it would suit the piece better, and also because the next piece on the page (another da Milano Fantasia) is one that I already happen to know in that tuning. The two would pair nicely if there was no need to change tuning.

The third piece is "Preambel" by Antonio Rotta, from the same book. This piece puzzled me when I first looked at it, although I hope it doesn't sound like that anymore. I think perhaps that much of the renaissance music we encounter in collections has been chosen because it is relatively accessible with our experience of tonal music.

This piece begins like it's in A minor and progresses like it's in D minor, but the larger phrases resolve to D major. Two or three times in it, however, D major is set up as though it's the V chord, which we would expect to resolve to G major, but instead it goes to E minor. It also has some significant IV-I cadences, which remind me of the polyphonic vocal music from that era which I love so much.

Thanks for listening, and I hope my discussion of the pieces gives you ideas to think about in your own music. I'll try to do this again more often.

PS:

For those of you interested in recording, my friend Doug has put a nice video on Youtube about the process of recording. He takes a track from his new album and talks about how it was recorded, processed, mixed, and mastered. You should view it on YouTube in high quality to get the most from it.

Los Romeros workshop (part 2): Etudes and repertoire

2011-11-04T03:00:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to be able to offer a whole lot of detail directly from a workshop I took no notes on, but I will offer a few highlights that I can recall and my own thoughts on those topics.

One idea that has stuck with me from the Los Romeros workshop I attended years ago, was Pepe's statement that students develop their technique using studies (specifically mentioning Carcassi, Sor, and Brouwer) and then reward their achievement with appropriate repertoire. This approach depends on having a patient student and some good guidance, but that's nothing unusual, is it?

I think he has a fair point. Etudes may not be "appropriate for the concert stage," but maybe it's better to work through the effort, frustration, and doubt of the learning process while learning these studies rather than the music you intend to perform. Then, maybe you can go on stage with a whole program of music without baggage of effort, frustration, and doubt. That sounds like a much better situation to me.

A well-composed study like Carcassi's can offer a systematic technical workout in a bite-sized (or perhaps mouthful) chunk. The flip side of that, which I don't think Pepe mentioned, is that a good musical understanding is what transforms a "boring study" into a satisfying piece of music is the performer's grasp of the music itself. Perhaps even more so than the technique.

For example, playing a slur study well is more than merely executing the slurs. The dynamics and tone colors have to flow with the line, and pull-offs to open strings can't sound plunky. So the technique of a descending slur isn't just "pluck the string with the left hand." The speed and direction of the motion, surface area of the finger used, and amount of pulling the string sideways versus sliding across it are all factors that contribute to the sound of the slur.

If you try to control all of this at the muscular level, you'll just get bogged down in the details and never move on. It's much easier if you let your ears control your technique rather than your fingers.

Pittsburgh Classical Guitar Society, and a Los Romeros workshop (part 1)

2011-11-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

I'm planning to visit my family in Pittsburgh, PA over Thanksgiving this year. I was wondering if there might be any classical guitar concerts to attend while I'm there, and while searching for that, I discovered that Pittsburgh now has a classical guitar society. I'm surprised it didn't already have one, but I'm pleased to see that it does now.

Several years ago, when I was living in California, I flew to Pittsburgh to attend a Los Romeros concert with my dad (who has been a fan of them for as long as I can remember) and to go to a workshop that they were giving the next day. I thought it was to be a masterclass, but it was really more of a lecture/demonstration. I was surprised by how many guitarists attended, but when Pepe asked if anyone would like to play something, nobody volunteered at first. So, nervous novice that I was, I volunteered and played the first movement of La Catedral. I'd planned to play the whole thing, figuring that nobody else wanted to play, but near the end of the prelude, Pepe's cell phone rang. He was embarrassed that it happened, and I wasn't really upset, but my playing kind of fell apart and I ended with the prelude.

I'm glad I played, though, because one by one after that, others decided to play something, until nearly everyone in the room had played. I distinctly remember a 10 or 11 year old boy playing Brouwer's etude #1 with great gusto. It hadn't occurred to him that he should be nervous like the rest of us, I suppose.

I had forgotten about this workshop until recently. I didn't take notes, unfortunately, but I think I remember some of the highlights. I'll write up what I can remember for my next blog post.

I want to thank my readers that have stuck with me even though I haven't been posting as often recently. I appreciate it.

Playing on the beat

2011-10-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

I've been working recently on learning to play 'drums' on a midi keyboard, for a recording project. I haven't seriously played a keyboard instrument since I was 8, so I have no real keyboard technique, and seeing my notes appear on screen piano-roll-style made it obvious that I was playing ahead of the beat all the time. This could easily be fixed after the fact, but I knew I'd be happier if I could get it right from the beginning.

As a quick aside, getting it right doesn't mean every note has to be squarely on the beat. That goes for classical guitar too, as my teacher frequently reminds me.

I spent a bunch of time trying to play on the beat, and was still always ahead of it, being both incompetent and anxious that I was going to get it wrong yet again. So then I started trying to deliberately play after the metronome click, hoping that my tendency to anticipate the beat would even things out. At first, it made me feel way more anxious (I'm going to be late!) but the recording and 'piano roll' don't lie; almost right away, I was right on.

Now, I'm not going to say the problem is 100% solved, but after spending more time with it, the anxiety started going away with the comfort of knowing that I was actually playing in time. The tempo felt slower, and I felt less like I needed to hurry to get the next note. Instead of feeling like I'm playing late, it's starting to feel like I was just playing.

This would be a good way for anyone to work on a tendency to play off the beat. Record yourself playing with a metronome and listen carefully to the result. If you find that you're playing early, try waiting for the click before playing next time. If you play late, try anticipating the click.

If you're right on all the time, try playing ahead of or behind the beat intentionally for effect. This kind of control of the rhythm is the next step.

Making art vs. making pretty pictures

2011-09-09T14:21:00.000-07:00

Just a brief post this week. I've been reading "The Rest Is Noise" by Alex Ross for the past few days and would strongly recommend it to any classical guitarist even though there's not much, if any, info related to the guitar in it.

If you're not a fan of 20th century/modern/contemporary/new music, this book is especially for you. For one thing, the author's thoughtful descriptions of many of the key pieces can help unlock this dense music for a listener who doesn't have the ear for it.

More importantly, The Rest Is Noise traces the development of many of the composers, movements, and ideas behind modern music through their historical context. Understanding how and why this music came about can help us learn to recognize the art in what may actually seem like a bunch of noise at times.

My art teacher in high school, Mr. deGroot, used to say that the point of art is not to make "pretty pictures." Setting aside the fact that a lot of 20th century art is unapologetically the opposite of "pretty pictures," let's consider that the guitar repertoire in fact contains a lot of music for which the composer was essentially paid by the page for their work in order to satisfy demand. A lot of that music is more like "pretty picture" music than art music.

That's not to say that its unworthy of being played, but it is up to us as performers to find the art in the music that we play. And sometimes it is worthwhile for us to take on music which we may find difficult to appreciate; to explore it and come to terms with it. The better we understand what makes something a work of art, the better prepared we will be to create art of our own, with whatever raw materials we have available.

My new old routine

2011-09-02T06:58:00.000-07:00

Since I moved to Tulsa, I'd been busy with job hunting and then job doing, and I haven't had much inspiration for blogging. For a while, I felt like I was losing a lot of ground with the guitar itself, so I went back to my old routine of getting up early to practice before work. It worked for me pretty well, the last time I work working a full-time job.

Long story short, my playing sprang back up to normal and I'm making progress again. My 9-month long memorization block went away and I'm learning new repertoire quickly again.

Being sleepy from waking up early is a very different thing than being exhausted from using my brain all day. I think that it's much to be open to learning in this state, even if I feel a bit cranky. Patience and diligence are more readily available. A nice cup of coffee as a reward afterward helps. I hate waking up to an alarm, but it is really nice knowing that I've made music a priority again.

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PS: I'm gradually moving my blog over to my website. For a while I will be posting to both, but I won't switch over completely until I've fixed up the postings that I've transferred over. Some of the videos and things don't survive the import process and I haven't had time to fix them.

More thoughts on Effortless Mastery

2011-08-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

Life has been busy recently, unfortunately full of real-world work, and not a whole lot of time for music. As I often do in these times, I'm still practicing guitar regularly but focusing on one just thing. This time, it is effortlessness.

It took me a really long time to figure out that the way to play effortlessly is not to struggle with material until it becomes easy and effortless. To date, that method has never worked for me.

The message of Kenny Werner's excellent "Effortless Mastery" book basically boils down to this:

To play effortlessly, you have to play effortlessly now.
You play effortlessly now by playing only what you can play effortlessly now.
To play new things effortlessly, you have to work on them as slowly and/or gradually as necessary to keep the effortless feeling. Develop the comfort zone gradually.
Play the material fast sometimes, too, but keep the effortless feeling and completely ignore mistakes. You can work them out in the slow practice; the fast practice is to get used to the feeling of playing fast.

So what is effortlessness?

I used to think it was a physical feeling, but that's just part of it. Keeping a quiet mind is just as important. With the mind quiet and even detached from the physical side of playing, it becomes much easier to listen to what you're doing and develop a listening-based method of playing rather than a physical activity-based method of playing.

It's important to learn the feeling of effortlessness as early on as you can, whether you're working on difficult music, scales, basic finger mechanics, or even just sitting silently with the guitar.

A film about Leo Brouwer

2011-07-22T03:00:00.001-07:00

Youtube user elduendecillo07 uploaded this fascinating documentary on Leo Brouwer. I've created a playlist that should play them all in order. There's a lot discussion of style and ideas, plus many clips of him playing his own music and others'.

Not everyone loves Brouwer's music, but to me he is one of the greatest composers of our era for any instrument. I got hooked on classical guitar when I first heard a classmate play Brouwer's Etude #1. I come back to his Estudios Sencillos once or twice a year, always trying to play them better and discover more in them.

William Kanengiser masterclass notes, part 4

2011-07-15T03:00:00.000-07:00

The final performer at the William Kanengiser masterclass I've been writing about played the fourth movement of Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Homage to Boccherini. Kanengiser offered some thoughts particular to Tedesco's writing. It's often said that the guitar should be treated like a miniature orchestra, because of the wealth of tone colors it offers us, and that idea is especially applicable to a composer like Tedesco who was very much an orchestral composer. He was also very particular about how he used dynamics and articulations.

The rest of the feedback given to this performer was of a technical nature, so I'm going to conclude this series of posts by gathering together all the technical and miscellaneous suggestions that were offered during the masterclass.

Kanengiser reiterated throughout the class the importance of pulling the notes out of the guitar, moving the strings rather than hitting them. This is really the key to getting a good, consistent tone and needs to be at the core of our technique so that even in the fastest playing where you can't be thinking about control, you can rely on your fingers to activate the strings effectively. Move the strings in towards you before releasing them.
The open high E string needs to always be played warmly and fully, to keep the tone balanced with the other strings. Do whatever you can to avoid harshness/excessive brightness.
When performing vibrato, move from the shoulder and use the forearm as a pivot point. Don't just wiggle or shake the hand, but get the larger muscles involved.
Practice maintaining the clarity and continuity of a single voice when changing strings. This is difficult on guitar, but really important to musical playing.
You can be flexible with the right and left hand positions in order to solve technical problems. The two examples I recall Kanengiser giving were related to damping. We often hear that the last phalanx of the left hand fingers should be positioned perpendicular to the plane of the fingerboard so as to only touch one string at a time, but when playing a descending scale in open position, dropping the hand a bit so the pads of the fingertips touch the adjacent string allows us to easily damp the open strings we've played so they don't keep ringing inappropriately. Likewise, we can roll the right hand thumb one way or another to damp a bass string while it is resting on an adjacent one in preparation.
Sometimes it's necessary to simplify the music in order to discover its true shape. For example, when the melody is part of a series of arpeggios, leave out the arpeggios for a while and work on the melody on its own.
When considering the shape of a line, figure out which notes are "juicy" and which are transitions. It's important for us to understand where the notes fit in the harmony and relation to the beat. Guitarists are infamous for arbitrary and inappropriate accents.

This concludes my series of posts from that masterclass. Thanks for reading! If you've found this information to be helpful or you've otherwise enjoyed reading it, be sure to check out William Kanengiser's CDs, DVDs, and performances.

William Kanengiser masterclass notes, part 3

2011-07-08T03:00:00.000-07:00

Continuing on from my notes from a masterclass given by William Kanengiser in San Jose, back in 2007 or 2008.

The next student played the Prelude from Bach's Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro BWV 998. Some of Kanengiser's comments reiterate ones I have already mentioned, but I will include them again.

Dynamics are important, but be careful how you use them. Think like a storyteller. When you want to change dynamics, you can't lose the thread of the story.
Bach's music is often ambiguous about whether it's one voice or multiple voices. The 998 prelude is a good example, as are the cello suites (as written for cello). You should get familiar with the implied lines as well as the literal ones, for cues to the overall shape of the piece.
Take cues for dynamics from the harmony.
The bass accents should follow the pulse of the rhythm. It's important to convey the rhythm in the bass as well as the upper voices. Don't be lazy about any voice.
The phrasing of pieces is influenced by harmonic modulations. This is especially true in Bach, as it modulates so much. Get to know the harmony!

The penultimate performer also played Bach, the Gavottes from Cello suite no. 5. Feedback focused on structure and phrasing:

Ritards in music are like punctuation in writing. Phrases are like sentences. Pieces in a suite are like chapters in a book. Make it all fit together.
Breath - in suites, you need just the right amount of time to convey the separation but also the relations. The tempi need to feel related.
You need to feel sense of cut-time in gavottes.

My notes for the final performer are a little more lengthy so they will wait for now.

William Kanengiser masterclass notes, part 2

2011-07-01T03:00:00.000-07:00

Continuing on from last week's post... Looking at the notes again, I was impressed by how much time William Kanengiser devoted to musical issues versus purely technical ones. I've decided to write this up in multiple parts, which will cover all the musical issues first and the final will cover technical and other miscellaneous ones.

The second performer played Guardame Las Vacas. Kanengiser mentioned that it was one of, if not the earliest written example of theme & variations. It's based on a popular theme of the time and I seem to remember him singing a bit of it, although that may be a confabulation on my part. You can hear a version by Alonso Mudarra for voice and (I think) baroque guitar played by Catherine King and Jacob Heringman here. It differs quite a bit from the familiar version by Narvaez, but I wanted to put in a plug for one of my favorite albums.

I have only two musical-issue related notes from this piece:

The notes on top are supported by the rhythm underneath. Kanengiser has the student play it as alternating bars of 3+3 and 2+2+2 accents, found so frequently in spanish music. It helped the student give the piece a stronger sense of rhythmic structure and direction.
Rhythmic energy is not necessarily the same thing as dynamic strength. I haven't recorded the context of this not but I assume the student at first put his previous suggestion into practice accenting the beats too forcefully but it is a great general observation. Often times a lighter beat can be more effective and appropriate as long as the beat is conveyed clearly.

The third student played Gavota-Choro by Heitor Villa-Lobos. IIRC, this student was a youngster, perhaps ten or eleven years old, who had broken his arm fairly recently and had just had the cast removed the day before. In spite of this, he only missed one day of practice. He was also playing a 3/4 size guitar and, frankly, had tone that most guitar students would be envious of. Needless to say, he was quite impressive, not to mention fearless. Of course, there was good feedback for him as well.

Tone - volume is sometimes less important than richness. A full tone produced by playing somewhat over the soundhole and giving due attention to the quality of each of the voices in the music and the evenness/continuity of their dynamics will give a better overall impression of loudness and projection than attempting to play loudly but without the sense of evenness.
Rallentando - Imagine the rhythm of the notes like a baseball card the spokes of a bicycle wheel as the wheel is slowing down gradually.

William Kanengiser masterclass notes, part 1

2011-06-24T03:00:00.000-07:00

I was looking through an old notebook this morning and found notes I took at a masterclass William Kanengiser gave in San Jose, CA two or three years ago as part of the Suzuki convention. My notes were hastily written and not terribly detailed, but I'll use them to jog my memory and fill in what I can regarding topics that are generally applicable. Apologies if I've misinterpreted my memory from that far back, but I'll do the best I can. :)

The first student played Sor's Rondeau, opus 48 number 6, and in response Kanengiser made several suggestions about phrasing:

The shape of phrases follow the strength of the harmony. Harmonies are used for specific reasons, and especially so in classical period music like Sor's. There are some general rules, like when you have a dissonance resolving into a consonance, the (tense) dissonance should be louder than the consonance (release), but the deeper your understand of how this works, the easier it will be for you to give a mature interpretation of phrasing. This is all covered in depth on Chris Davis's website.
Tension, release, surprise - This is related to the above. Consonance moving to dissonance and back create tension and release it, but be on the look out for sudden and significant changes of harmony. Many pieces change keys to break up the tonality, and we might want to change our tone color or dynamics somewhat to reflect the change. Sometimes we are given an unexpected chord quite suddenly - this is meant to give a sense of surprise and we should play that up.
Crescendo - start soft enough to really get louder, to exaggerate the effect. Kanengiser suggested not just playing the section before the crescendo quieter, but dropping the volume at the beginning of a crescendo in order to give enough dynamic range to convey the effect and emphasize the new dynamic.
When playing bass notes, think like a bass player. It's often said that we should work on the lines in the music we play individually to shape them the way we want. I think Kanengiser wants us to go a step farther. How would a bassist articulate the bassline? For that matter, if you consider the "guitar as miniature orchestra" idea and you have section of music that suggests a brass section, how would the brass section in an orchestra articulate that?
After using rubato/decelerando, we need a strong sense of rhythm to pull us back into the pulse.
When making big leaps, think like a singer - it should have a sense of arrival, not a frantic grab for what we hope might be the right note.

This is getting longer than I expected, so I will continue with it next week.

Big thanks to the Longay school for sponsoring the masterclass, the participants, and of course Kanengiser himself, who is a thoroughly gracious and inspiring teacher. I had the opportunity to play in a masterclass for him a few years prior, but unfortunately for me I was very sick at the time and not able to focus very well nor remember much of the experience.

Unforgiving

2011-06-17T03:00:00.000-07:00

After doing some maintenance on my guitar this week, I put on a new set of strings, of a type I hadn't used before. I'm not going to tell you what they are, but they are much lower tension than I normally use on my guitar.

I strung it up, tuned to pitch, and played a few notes and was really blown away by how beautiful they sounded. All the warmth, fullness, and volume I've ever wanted in a string, yet so easy to play.

Today has been kind of a crazy day for me, though, and after playing for a while I was really unhappy with my sound. At first I wanted to just swap them for something familiar, but I thought maybe I'd damaged my nails, so I redid them. As I tested them out, I could get that great tone again, but it went away when I started playing normally. Frustrating.

These strings are just totally unforgiving, and with any carelessness on my part the tone is unusably lousy. But with nails well-cared-for, solid contact with the string, and well-directed plucking motion, they reward me beautifully. That's how I want to sound all the time, and that's how I want to play all the time, regardless of the strings.

I think it'll be worthwhile to leave them on for a while and focus on whatever I need to do to get that classic tone.

Martha Masters: Reaching the Next Level

2011-06-10T03:00:00.000-07:00

Before beginning my video project in April, I went to Rosewood Guitar in Seattle and told their employee Robert that I was looking for some music I could easily work up and record in a day. It had to be fairly straightforward and, almost more importantly, it needed to not require page turns.

Robert recommended Martha Masters' book "Reaching the Next Level," because it contained many pieces that met that criteria and also offered thoughtful suggestions before each piece.

I bought the book, but I didn't end up using it for my recordings, although I was reminded of the Reginald Smith Brindle pieces by it, for which I already had the sheet music. The music is well-selected, mostly offering pieces which are not likely to be found in other similar books.

Masters offers anecdotes throughout the various topics which I found to be refreshingly candid and honest. They help reinforce the idea that as we study and perform music, we should consider all the available input into consideration and make our decisions thoughtfully.

I found her recommendations for each piece, as well as her suggestions in general to be great advice. Overall, there is more focus on musical issues than technical, although both are covered. I really respect the author's efforts here as often times these things are not covered, or are if they are covered than the surface is barely scratched.

The book is geared towards intermediate players looking to, well, reach the next level although its principals are pretty solid and valuable for players at any level. Realistically, much of it would probably go over the heads of readers who don't have a certain amount of experience under their belts. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it, though, because anyone who's open to learning could very well find something useful in it. What it comes down to is that this book fills in some of the gaps left by most other instructional materials available.

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PS: I'm more or less settled in in Tulsa now. I've rebuilt my website and created a new one called Classical Guitar Tulsa which is primarily to advertise my lessons, but I am considering adding a blog to it where I can post info about local classical guitar related events. It's just not yet clear to me how often there are any local classical guitar related events to post about...

The Norton Manual of Music Notation

2011-06-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

The ability to read and sight-read music effectively depends on a lot of factors. The symbols on the page are extremely important, of course, but there are a lot of subtle elements that can help clue us in on what's going on when we don't have time to process each symbol individually. Spacing is a big one. A lot of computer-generated scores that I've seen online have poor spacing and it makes them more difficult to read than they should be.

The Norton Manual of Music Notation is a great book on how to write music properly and quickly. Although its focus is on hand-written music, its principals apply to any western music notation. I recommend all musicians learn to recognize and apply these ideas, through this book or other similar ones, in order to make sure we have quality written input for our music making.

Quick tip

2011-05-27T03:00:00.000-07:00

Sorry for missing a few weeks of blogging. With a funeral to attend, a 5-day drive from my old home of Mount Vernon, WA to my new home in Tulsa, OK, then unpacking and getting my bearings, I haven't had much time to think about blogging. I promise to get back to it ASAP.

Here's a quick tip. An hour before my guitar duo's last gig, I had a mishap with my nail file and basically stabbed myself in the quick, under my left pinky nail. It was painful and bloody.

I took my duo partner's advice and put vitamin E oil on it, including under the nail as best as I could. It helped the wound heal within the next day, but it also dulled the pain considerably. I was able to play the gig without any trouble.

See you next week

2011-05-05T22:58:00.000-07:00

I'm traveling on family business right now and am not prepared to write a post... So here's one of my favorite videos on Youtube, of Rolf Lislevand playing a Chaconne by de Visee on Theorbo.

Sustained notes within a line

2011-04-29T03:00:00.000-07:00

This has come up a few times for me recently, and while it's not an original idea, I thought I'd share it for those who don't know about it.

Classical guitar is a rather percussive instrument with quick decay, and often times the music we play has notes written within a line which are far longer than the instrument will actually sustain. Yet, when you hear this music played by a great guitarist (whose expensive guitar may or may not offer an extra millisecond of sustain), the line sounds unbroken.

There are tricks for increasing sustain, vibrato can help, but this is what really makes it work. You need to match the next note to the memory of the attack and tone of the sustained note. Otherwise, if you accent it too much or too little, you may give the impression that you're starting a new phrase.

Also, sometimes (especially in baroque or renaissance music), a voice can disappear for several measures before returning. To my ears, it's particularly effective when, for example, a piece with three voices sounds like they're the same three voices throughout. This doesn't mean there can't be dynamics or variation in the tone color, it's a matter of intention and attention to detail. I noticed this effect a lot with Paul Galbraith's Bach recordings.

What it all boils down to is that you should make a goal of matching the sound your create with the instrument with the intention you've got in your head. Then you just need to listen a lot to great music and educate your imagination.

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PS: I've concluded my video project, as I have to finish moving out of my house and am just too busy for the next few days. I will keep posting music I work on periodically, so please subscribe to my Youtube channel.

Here's a link to the playlist with all 13 videos I made this month.

Get off to a good start

2011-04-22T03:00:00.000-07:00

I've discovered through my video project that I've been able to play (and record) pieces that I've worked on for only a day as well or better than ones I've worked on for months or years. It's not comfortable to admit that, but now that I know this, I can make progress and hopefully help others who are in the same boat.

You see, usually I would sight read through various pieces I liked from time to time, to gauge my readiness for a given piece. If I could play all of it, I would decide it was OK to start learning it.

The problem was, I had unwittingly already started learning it in a lazy and unfocused manner and I'd probably ignored the fingerings, missed some dynamic markings, etc, figuring it was OK because I would address them when I started learning the piece for real. But I'd built in some habits already, and then readying a piece for performance was a process of unlearning the errors and shaping the piece the way I wanted it.

Well, I've had no time for that, so I had to just decide on an overall interpretation for the piece, break it down into manageable chunks and then commit to getting them to sound how I wanted ASAP. Then I could put the whole thing together and refine things from a more solid state of preparation.

The lesson is this: The more attention paid and intention invested in the details at the beginning of the process, the quicker, better, and more consistent the results.

Video project

2011-04-15T03:00:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, I am working on a project to make a video every day (when possible) for the rest of April 2011. I'm having a great time with it, and heartily encourage others to give it a try. Here's a link to my Youtube playlist for this project. I invite you to subscribe to my channel!

Here is my process:

Choose a piece (or related pieces), preferably something relatively simple and unfamiliar to me. They will very in difficulty but will need to be short enough to not require page turning, and should not have more than a few technical difficulties.
Record myself sightreading it.
Analyze the result; make note of any difficulties, determine interpretation.
Isolate technical issues and practice
Refine interpretation
Record again and post!

The audio will be somewhat close-mic'd (2-3 feet away) and will remain unprocessed.

The end result probably won't be perfect, but one thing I have learned from performing is that at some point you just have to let the music out into the world. The sooner and more often, the better.

I've just started, but here are some random things I have learned or been reminded of so far:

Recording yourself is good, especially with video, but doing it frequently is even better. The feedback you get is incredibly helpful.
Give yourself a deadline every now and then to help you focus. A recital, open mic, video recording, etc.
I need to pay more attention to my right hand fingerings. I'm surprised by how much I repeat fingers, although left to its own devices, my hand will start alternating once it becomes necessary to achieve the necessary speed.
Left-hand positioning is really important. I don't think there's one universally "perfect" position, but if you're making a shift (for example) make sure you land in a position that's advantageous for what you're about to play.
You can learn a lot about your playing by watching your face while you play.

Whose art is it anyway?

2011-04-07T03:00:00.000-07:00

Take a piece like Villa Lobos's Prelude #3, and compare several recordings of it to the score if you have it. There is a sort of "traditional" interpretation of this piece, in which performances tend to follow a similar (to each other) contour of dynamics and rubato, to the point where the rhythms you will hear no longer really resemble what the composer notated.

There's a similar sort of tradition with Sor's famous B minor study, Opus 35 #22. My copy of "Complete Sor Studies" has the tempo marked Allegretto. Every 19th century copy I've seen of the piece says Allegretto... Yet there seems to be a contest amongst performers to be give the slowest performance of it.

That study clearly works well when played slowly. Sor could have written "Andante" and no one would have thought differently of it. But he didn't. So does everyone who plays it slowly do it because they spent time with the piece and decided slow was best? Or was it because that's what they were used to? Maybe Segovia's edition has a slower tempo marking.

Prelude #3 works just fine when played with that particular pattern of rubato. But I was actually surprised when I read through it the first time, that some of the written rhythms were so different from what I was used to hearing and I can't help but think that if HVL would have written them differently if that was what he really wanted. We should at least consider that. Somehow I doubt that everyone that plays it that way studied the score, and chose to play it exactly that way because of the contents of the score.

We can get so accustomed to hearing a certain type of interpretation of a piece that when played strictly as written it sounds amazingly wrong. Don't be afraid to play something differently from how it's written, if that's what moves you, but consider whether you're making your own artistic choices or letting someone else do it for you.

Between the notes

2011-04-01T03:00:00.000-07:00

We need to develop technique so we can communicate with our listeners. We often get caught up in what is cool, or difficult, or whatever, but that's not really worth much if it doesn't help us communicate.

We can work endlessly on scales, arpeggios, slurs, tremolo, etc, but that's just where technique starts. Real technique is attention to the details that make the music come alive. Virtuosity is mastery of the details of those details.

Listen to some great flamenco guitarists, and notice when they buzz notes. It's not random and it's not merely because of the setup of their guitars. It's integral to the feel of the music. You learn that by listening.

Listen to when a singer or flute player breathes, and the sound of the breath. That's part of the music.

As a fan and player of irish music, I can't tell you how obvious it is when I hear someone who thinks that all there is to the music is playing the notes. I could learn flamenco falsetas from a book but to a real flamenco afficionado it's just going to sound like a classical guitarist reading the notes. It has to have the right feel, and you learn that by listening.

When people say "music is in the space between the notes," they don't just mean the rests. They mean that the notes are one of many aspects of music, and they all require our attention.

Why you should perform

2011-03-25T03:00:00.000-07:00

But actually, doing what other people expect you to is what’s overrated. The external rewards for pursuing a dream may or may not arrive, but regardless, you should feel proud of doing so. The first steps are more important than the later ones, because they’ll provide inspiration and security for everything that comes later. Just keep walking!

Never despise small beginnings, and don’t belittle your own accomplishments. Remember them and use them as inspiration as you go on to the next thing. When you venture outside your comfort zone, wherever the starting point may be, it’s kind of a big deal.

- Chris Guillebeau, in "Kind of a big deal"

I recently commented on Chris Davis's post "The missing ingredient no one likes to talk about" that of all the musicians I've known, we classical guitarists seem like the least likely to get out and perform. We also complain about lack of public interest, diminishing ticket sales, etc. I bet these things are related.

If you love classical guitar and you play classical guitar, you should get out there and perform.

Don't feel like it's not worth it if you can't sell out an auditorium. Don't feel like nobody will want to see you if you don't have a degree or haven't won a competition. Don't worry about trying to impress people.

Just have fun and do your best. You don't have to blow everyone's mind, just make someone smile.

Making changes

2011-03-18T03:00:00.000-07:00

After giving a house concert in Seattle a few weeks ago (big thanks to Rich for hosting!), once of the audience members said to me, "that Bach suite must have taken forever to learn."

I've written about my experience learning this suite (BWV 1009) in the past and I'd sum it up by saying that I've tried every memory and visualization trick in the book on it and I've never had so much trouble with memorization with a piece. It didn't go badly in performance, but I needed the music in front of me to feel confident that I could stay on track.

So I responded, "I feel like I'll still be learning it when I'm an old man. If I could start over again with it and do one thing differently, I would study it a lot more before trying to play it."

Sometimes it's tempting to get into practice mode before music is properly studied and learned. In this case, the piece superficially appears 'easy'; it's mostly one note at a time, fairly easy to read, somewhat (deceptively) formulaic, and because of my listening history, it's very familiar.

But I was tricked by that sense of familiarity into believing I had studied it enough. I clearly skipped head, because as time went on, I kept finding areas where I wanted to change my fingerings to get things across better.

That's sort of where the problems started showing up. Better fingerings are, well, better, but what happens when you change fingerings? If you've been practicing the old way for a while, you've now practiced two ways of doing it. How do you make sure you're going to do it the right way when it comes time to perform?

Thorough study at the beginning of the learning process, finding the best solutions and committing to them early on, seems like the best way to head this problem off at the pass.

There will be cases where you need to change a fingering, but you need an effective brainwashing strategy (please share!) or it may be better to make note of your new way but then leave it alone until you've had a chance to put the piece down for a while and look at afresh.

---
PS: Speaking of making changes, my wife Angeline and I are moving to Tulsa over the next month or so. She leaves in mid-April, after which my life will get quite boring. So I'm planning to make a series of videos between then and the end of April or so, in which I work on a short piece for a day and then film&post it. My main focus will be on musicality, but I have a few other goals:

1) Learn to pull together pieces and interpretations more quickly
2) Produce a demo CD to send to senior centers and other gig venues
3) Watch my movements, facial expressions, etc, and learn what I can from them
4) Get more comfortable with recording.

I've posted the first video already, mainly as a technology test. I hope to achieve better quality video in the future, but that may not happen until I can afford a real video camera. I'm pleased with the quality of the audio, though. The description on the youtube page describes my setup.

My hope is that I'll enjoy this project, learn a lot from it, and want to keep it up in the long run.

See you next week

2011-03-11T03:00:00.001-08:00

I've been sick with flu and now bronchitis for more than a week now, and although I started writing my post for this week, I don't have the energy to give it all the thought it deserves. So here are some photos my wife Angeline took at our recent recital in Bellingham.

See you next week.

Casals and the Art of Interpretation

2011-03-04T03:00:00.000-08:00

I read "Casals and the Art of Interpretation by David Blum around the time I started this blog and have been meaning to write about it ever since. It's a treasure-trove of wisdom about music, and also paints a lively picture of Pablo Casals, sprinkled with quotes and anecdotes that bring to life the character from which the wisdom springs.

Although a lot of musicianship can be broken down into guidelines to follow, it's the individual that makes them into music.

It's worth noting that Casals' views represent a particular school of thought that I think is not considered universal today. A lot of his recommendations go against what's said Anthony Glise's "Classical Guitar Pedagogy" book, to give an example of a book guitarists will run into which deals with interpretation. I'm not saying either is "the right way" of doing things.

Phrasing

One thing that is highlighted in the book is the importance of the phrasing of musical lines. This comes more naturally to singers and people who play monophonic instruments, but most guitar music involves multiple simultaneous lines and we need to shape those independently.

The typical (and rightly so) advice is to consider these lines individually and sing them out loud. Casals suggests that within each line, the sound should get louder as the notes ascend, and quieter as they descend. This probably doesn't mean that phrases should usually have a wide range of dynamics, but that they sing out in a natural way.

The downside with guitar music as it is printed is that more often than not, we are not given phrasing slurs and in the clutter of fitting multiple voices on one staff, the phrasing can often appear ambiguous. I used to naively assume that they would follow the bar lines and consequently ended up with music that sounded very flat and dull. Then I learned that phrases often begin before the bar line, and are often longer than a bar.

The best ways to deal with this is to work on your music with an experienced teacher and to listen to a variety of high-level performers playing music and follow along in the score. It doesn't have to be (and shouldn't always be) guitar music. If you're interested in Casals, for example, you could listen to him on archive.org and you can probably find the scores on imslp.org.

Easy and simple aren't the same thing

2011-02-25T03:00:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I went to the Sean Nós Northwest festival at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, and played an awful lot of irish flute. This festival is a great celebration of Irish language, song, and dance, and so there were few instrumentalists there but we were treated with especially great respect and gratitude by the dancers.

It was especially fascinating to me to watch how a room full of 20-30 dancers could lock into rhythm with each other and with the music. I got the feeling that one could learn this kind of dance more easily by listening than by watching or thinking.

At the festival, we also watched a film called "Come West Along the Road," which consists of archival footage of musicians, singers, dancers, etc. I was really struck by a segment which, conveniently, is also on YouTube:

I was kind of amused at first by his one-finger-per-hand style of guitar playing. How much easier and more straightforward could it get?

But then I realized that I have no idea how much work this guy put into the guitar part, because he seems so unconcerned with it that you can't even call it an afterthought. But it's just there for him, perfectly steady, as natural as walking.

What he's playing is really simple, but I really admire the conviction with which he plays it and the complete effortlessness of it. There's really nowhere to hide in something like that.

One more thing; not to turn this into a giant group hug but there's more than meets the eye in any performance and even a failed one is probably the result of an honest effort. Let's be sure to give credit where credit is due.

Trust yourself

2011-02-18T03:00:00.000-08:00

Peter Mitchell commented on my "You have to really listen" post:

I think this is related to the discussion around "multitasking". I think the idea that you can passively listen, which implies focusing on other things, and still fully experience the music is definitely not the case. Multitasking is somewhat of a myth when you look at how our brains actually function. Something always has to take priority when it comes to assigning attention. So in this case, it needs to be the music. Otherwise, I think you are missing out on a lot that you don't even realize.

I agree, and I think that what I encountered in my previous post was that sometimes putting a lot of effort into 'focusing' can be a distraction from what you're actually doing.

You have to listen to what you're playing, and you have to know how to actually play it, but my experience has been that conscious control, especially in performance, can lead to the opposite effect.

In other words, I play my best when I can just let go and trust myself. It's not always an easy thing to do; at least not yet.

How do you learn to trust yourself?

Prepare thoroughly

Learn the music correctly from the beginning. Understand it before you play it. Practice it regularly and efficiently. Don't practice mistakes; focus on solutions before repetitions.

Don't get too far ahead of yourself

Plan to perform mostly music that is within your reach. It's good to push yourself a bit so you can grow, but if your whole program consists of music you can only occasionally perform well, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

Play with your eyes closed

Playing with your eyes closed will tell you how well you really know a piece, but if you've been playing for a while and you haven't tried it before, you might find that you can do it better than you expected. I think it helps cultivate a better physical understanding of the instrument as well as an aural experience of the music.

Take a leap of faith

Sometimes, in spite of your best efforts, you may end up in a situation where performance day is nearly upon you and things haven't all come together the way you wanted. At that point, the best thing you can do for yourself is decide to just have fun and do your best.

That's harder than it sounds, but it is absolutely possible. You have to make the choice and commit to it. You have to make that same choice at some point even when you're well-prepared, because performing in front of people is a different skill than preparing in private, and it's a different skill than practicing performing or performing for a recording.

----

PS: My recent bunch of gigs were really fun! I had a duo gig with Jason on Thursday, solo recital Saturday afternoon, fundraiser solo/duo recital with my wife Angeline Saturday evening, and then a house concert in Seattle on Tuesday night. At the last one, I got to play in front of a roomful of guitarists, which is usually the hardest thing but it felt great.

It's a real privilege to play for an audience that understands the music and the effort that went into preparing it!

What do you focus on?

2011-02-11T03:00:00.000-08:00

I managed to smash my left middle finger in the bathroom door on Monday night. I'm not sure how it happened, but I came out of it with a small cut and a numb fingertip. Yuck!

So I decided to take it easy on practicing the next day and just play through my Bach Cello suite for fun. I sat down to play and got into my "I'm concentrating!" mode, and soon enough things were going ... well, not great.

Frustrated, I decided to put the guitar away and do something else for a while. But I got bored and came back to the guitar to work on one of the movements that didn't go right. I started by playing through it again, and a funny thing happened.

I got distracted somehow and found myself thinking I should start working on my taxes. Suddenly, I noticed that I was playing great. Huh? I played a few whole of the suite as well as I'd like to play them in concert.

Thinking about my taxes is probably not the magic recipe for success, but I'm pretty sure that lightening up and letting go is part of it.

What do you focus on when you perform? Listening to the sound? Visualizing what's ahead?

Wooten's metronome games

2011-02-04T03:00:00.000-08:00

Philip Hii's been writing about rhythm a lot on his blog lately, and so I feel like it's a good time to work on my rhythm (it's always a good time to work on rhythm). I think I have pretty good rhythm, but I would rather leave no room for doubt about it.

I recently read Victor Wooten's excellent book "The Music Lesson" (thanks to Doug Young for the recommendation!) in which he discusses 10 fundamental aspects of musicianship in ways that I think are not often dealt with. He's a jazz bassist, of course, and the book is written somewhat from that perspective, but pretty much all of it applies in one way or another to any other kind of music and instrument. I'll write up a review of it at some point, but for now...

Victor Wooten offers some interesting exercises for working on rhythm in "The Music Lesson," and there's a nice video on Youtube where he demonstrates some of them.

Watch this:

Applying this to classical guitar

I've taken La Catedral: Allegro Solemne and prepared the following example. The accent marks show where the metronome should click in relation to the music. The first example is how I typically feel the piece; the next two are a bit harder and then the rest are even harder.

For each one, start by counting out loud so the click lines up with the right beat. Victor demonstrates in the video. For a lot of us that will be a great exercise in and of itself.

Once you get that going, start playing the example on the "one" and work on it until you are comfortable with the beat placement. Then, if you know the rest of the piece, continue on and see how far you can keep time with the metronome on that beat. Or, apply it to a piece that you do know.

If you can make it through the whole thing without losing the beat, I salute you!

The rest of us should persist with it until we can.

I can't yet get all the way through the piece this way, but after an hour of working this way, I found that I was playing with a rhythmic clarity that I hadn't realized I was lacking before. But I also found that I could play way faster than usual without any tension, and barely made any mistakes. In fact, I felt like the music was playing itself!

Why? As Victor says, when you work on this exercise, you're no long just playing along with the metronome. The rhythm has to come from within you. It's one thing to feel like you're playing in time, and another to know with absolute confidence that you are. The metronome will tell you.

I would be surprised if anyone who tries and sticks with these exercises doesn't have a similar result. It just makes sense to me... It IS a mentally taxing exercise, but it's aimed directly at improving the most fundamental of musical skills.

You might not like hearing this, but the more difficult and frustrating these exercises are for you, the more likely it is you really need them. The upside is, you will be really glad you did!

Also, feel free to start with simpler music, I just chose what I happened to be working on this morning.

Good luck!

Always have a positive musical intent

2011-01-28T03:00:00.001-08:00

Philip Hii has been putting up a series of posts about speed and fluidity on his "Art of Virtuosity" blog recently. They're all great, so go check them out (when you're done reading this post!).

There's a section in his "Rebound" post that I wanted to look at:

If you find that you’re not rebounding quickly or that you’re hampered by a lack of speed in your plucking, you might want to check if lack of fluidity could be the culprit.

Make sure that as you play, you do not stop the finger at any point, especially when you have to rebound ie. change direction to bring it back to playing position again.

If you are, try moving the fingers upward after you pluck and rebound in a circular trajectory as described above. You might be surprised by the results.
Fluidity is at the heart of all efficient movement and is absolutely crucial for speed and power.

-Philip Hii

I think that a lot of times teachers try to convey to students that they shouldn't pluck the strings upwards away from the top of the guitar, which is something that a lot of people instinctively do for fear or getting "stuck" on the next string. "Don't pluck upwards" can eventually get thought of as "there shouldn't be any upward motion."

But somehow you have to clear the string on the way back to playing position, and I think that no matter how you conceptualize it, there will need to be some upward motion. Following Philip's advice will help you understand the whole motion you're working on rather than leaving some of it to chance.

Bicycling exercise

What Philip talks about reminds me of something I read in Pepe Romero's "Guitar Style and Technique" book. Sadly, it is long out of print and I have only been able to borrow it, so I will just paraphrase; Pepe recommends, as an exercise, moving your right hand fingers in circles as through you're pedaling a tiny bicycle.

I have seen it said that this motion should be "avoided at all costs," presumably because if you pluck the string upward, you will get a thin and weak tone... but if you already know how to make a good sounding stroke, it shouldn't be a problem to coordinate the motion so that the upwards portion doesn't begin too soon.

Which brings me too...

Always have a positive musical intent

It's important to work on technique by itself but it always helps to have a musical intent when you do it. I have noticed at times that I can play, for example, scale passages faster in a piece than I could when practicing scales on their own. The perception of difficulty often makes things harder than they really are because when we focus on what we don't want to happen. If you focus instead on what you do want, you'll probably get it quicker.

--

PS: I have several upcoming gigs in the Seattle area, although the only gig that's really "public" is at the Burlington, WA public library from 2-3pm. But for those of you attending the recital-type performances, here's what I'm playing:

Rodrigo: En Los Trigales
Turina: Fandanguillo
Villa-Lobos: Prelude 3
Barrios: Julia Florida, La Catedral
Bach: Cello Suite BWV 1009
Llobet: Plany

At at least two of these performances, there will be a piano present, so with my wife Angeline I'll also be playing:

Vivaldi: Trio Sonata rv82
Rodrigo: Españoleta (from Fantasia Para Una Gentilhombre)

You have to REALLY listen

2011-01-21T03:00:00.000-08:00

"Concerts undoubtedly have great value in developing the student technically and mentally; but too often they have a directly contrary effect. I think there is a very doubtful benefit to be derived from the present habit, as illustrated in New York, London, or other centers, of the student attending concerts, sometimes as many as two or three a day. This habit dwarfs the development of real appreciation, as the student, under these conditions, can little appreciate true works of art when he has crammed his head so full of truck, and worn out his faculties of concentration until listening to music becomes a mechanical mental process. The _indiscriminate_ attending of concerts, to my mind, has an absolutely pernicious effect on the student."

-Albert Spalding, from "Violin Mastery" by Frederick Martens, 1919

It's difficult for me to imagine a world where one could attend two to three concerts a day, but now we could just substitute "listen to your iPod."

Immersion is important

I feel a bit conflicted writing this, because I used to listen to irish traditional music almost all day long at work, and I think it was a big help for me to build up my repertoire of tunes. There are many hundreds of tunes I can play pretty well on the flute that I put no conscious effort into learning.

I'm convinced that immersing myself in the music of that tradition was crucial to learning it, as it would be with any form of music. After all, listening to music is fundamental for a musician, in order to develop a sense of style and continuity.

Saturation is the problem

However, it's really easy now to listen to music all day long, and to get into the habit of listening passively. You may be fooling yourself into thinking you're picking up on the details when you're not. It's not a big step to go from "listening passively" to "barely listening at all."

Listening to yourself while you practice and perform is crucial to success. When you're accustomed to "barely listening at all" to music, you may find it hard to listen to yourself while you play, especially if you are already struggling with confidence issues.

You have to REALLY listen!

I discovered about year ago that I was sort of bracing my ears as I played, hiding from the sounds I was making. I found that when I wanted to play something loudly, I ended up not really hearing it at all. It was a total shock to realize this, but it explained a lot about how different my music actually sounded from what I wanted to it to sound like.

I decided to take drastic (and almost painful) action. For several months, I stopped listening to music almost altogether. The only exception was when I could give all my attention to the music. I would sit on the floor in front of the stereo and listen to one piece at a time, following along in the score whenever possible. (YouTube, imslp.org and the Boije Collection are a great resources for this.)

I wasn't prepared for how quiet and weird my world became, compared to what I was used to. Almost immediately, though, I became aware of all manners of subtleties in the music that I listened to that I had never heard before. I began to hear what makes an interpretation work or not. I began to open up my ears to my own music again, and appreciate how much I really wasn't hearing.

That doesn't sound like me!

I've heard so many people say (and I've said it myself) that they're surprised by what they really sound like, when they listen back to a recording they've made of themselves. If you don't hear what it really sounds like while you're playing, you need to work on your listening skills.

Recording yourself is a helpful and important tool (and I encourage it), but it's not a substitute for being present in the moment while you're playing.

Louis Drouët: On the Method of Finishing a Piece

2011-01-14T03:00:00.000-08:00

Some food for thought today culled from Louis Drouët's 1830 method for playing the flute. I left the pre-Victorian ESL wording alone, because I find it amusing, but the advice is good:

On the Method of Finishing a Piece

"The word finish, as employed here, means to bring to perfection. Thus to finish a piece is to labour at it, until it is executed with much purity in the style, as well as neatness in the execution.

"To finish a piece, the question is not to play it to the end, to begin it again afresh and then tune and to continue thus for several days in succession, hoping to bring it to perfection by an execution of this kind. By such a mode of proceeding men become blinded to the piece which they study; they conclude by playing with coldness, and by executing the passages with rapidity, but without neatness; they become habitual to the defects of execution, which occur in the difficult passages, so much so, that they are unfelt by the performer though they strike the ears of his audience in the most glaring manner.

"The following is the shortest method to learn well and speedily, a piece of music that is to be performed in public.

"It is necessary in the first place to play it once or twice successively, to have a true conception of its general effects. Of the degree of movement which is best adapted to aid it, and in a word that which tends most to identify it with the composer. After this first operation, should be recommenced slowly, a pause should be made at every period, every phrase, and even at every bar; all the details should be laboured with the greatest ease till the performer has acquired the tact of giving the composition every degree of elegance, grace, and dignity; and to display the brilliant passages with the most striking neatness, energy, and splendour. Afterwards from time to time the piece should be performed as if it were executed before the public."

- Louis Drouët, London 1830

What is expression?

2011-01-07T03:00:00.001-08:00

Breaking rules for the sake of breaking rules isn’t usually art; it’s just anarchy. And following rules for the sake of following rules is just mindless conformity.

- David duChemin, "Don't Break the Rules"

For a while now, I've been following photographer David duChemin's blog. This recent post from him really hit the nail on the head. I think the kind of expression a lot of guitarists have come to equate with "soul" is what duChemin aptly calls "anarchy."

Communicating with the audience

An expressive performance creates, for the listener, the feeling that the composer and/or performer wants them to experience.

It doesn't mean holding a chord a bit longer, hitting some note louder, speeding up, or slowing just because you're trying to "express yourself" and that's how you feel it. That might fool a superficial listener, but it's not going to hold up in the long run.

There are certain conventions that have evolved over the course of music history in order to accomplish this goal of creating an effect for the listener. This is where ritardandi, rallentandi, accelerandi, accent, dynamics, etc come in to play. This is phrasing.

If you don't understand these things and aren't using these things appropriately, there's a very good chance you're not really communicating with your audience effectively.

Learn the "why"

If these things are applied too clinically or carefully, they may still fail to communicate fully, but they will probably still produce a more convincing performance for the audience than when they are used "intuitively" but inappropriately.

duChemin offers some great advice, too, for the artist or musician who wants to develop a genuine sense of expression. Think "musical expression" when he says "photographic expression":

Art created in adherence to rules is art about rules, not about passion or beauty or any other thing about which humans have made honest art over the centuries.

That’s not to say there aren’t helpful principles, but they are only that. They’re guides to help us make our decisions, but divorced from the Why, separated from the reason they became rules in the first place, they’re more a shackle than a permission to experiment and express. I know the usual response to this discussion is that you have to know the rules first, then you can break them; I think that’s baloney too. Just knowing the rules is useless. We need to understand the principles of photographic expression, the reasons these rules came into play to begin with in the first place, then use or ignore them in the service of our vision as we need.

- David duChemin

A mercifully brief rant

I started thinking about writing this post when I watched William Kanengiser play Sor's B minor etude and read the comments:

It is dry to say the least.He plays Sor with an
Art Deco approach....beautiful tones and longlines.
Lacking all the Accelerandi,Rallentando,and
varying beat placement,dynamic contrast,and as
you say ...color contrast....it is totally
unsoulful.
smithsherman 3 years ago 34
like a midi
loadermen 3 years ago 22

Now, anyone capable of listening to this recording objectively will hear plenty of accelerandi, rallentandi, and everything else smithsherman claims are not there. These things are not even subtle, and sometimes they're pretty dramatic.

So why are they undetectable to loadermen, smithsherman, and the 56 thumb-uppers? It's no wonder classical guitarists in general still have a poor reputation compared to other musicians.

Getting comfortable with recording

2010-12-31T03:00:00.000-08:00

It's often said that you get used to recording by recording more. While that's kind of true, it's not very helpful to look at it that way. If you feel miserable every time you record, recording 100 times isn't likely to make you happy.

It can be helpful is to frequently use recording as a tool. Don't worry about takes being "keepers" because none of them have to be. Try recording just a phrase at a time, listen back and work on the details.

You'll eventually start to get used to it and be able to perform better when that red light is on. As you get comfortable working this way, try longer sections of pieces. Gradually work your way up to recording whole pieces.

Mistakes: Chicken or egg?

Fear of mistakes is usually what stresses people out about recording, and ends up being the cause of those mistakes. Strengthening your memory and practice techniques will help you cope with this, but you need to work on your attitude about the process, too.

Give yourself permission to make mistakes and remind yourself of why you play in the first place. Hopefully you're doing it because it's fun and you love it. It's great to feel proud of your accomplishment, but if you play because you have something to prove, you're setting yourself up for a world of struggle.

You need to break the vicious cycle of "I'm worried I'll make a mistake. Oops, I made a mistake. Now I'm even more worried about it..." Mistakes will help you learn.

Make a distinction between transient errors like missed notes and errors of judgment like unclear phrasing and missing dynamics. Technical goofs happen and can be prevented, but often times they happen because of vague musical idea. You should definitely learn to clean up your technique bue also be really clear about what you want to do and present in your playing.

Of course, it sometimes just comes down to plain old insufficient preparation. Well, at least you've learned what you need to work on in order to be able to record it well. Instead of getting stressed about it, make note of what you need to work on, take a break, and then dive back into practicing.

Other approaches

Sometimes the recording process itself can be a big source of distraction. Some suggestions for dealing with that:

Devote some time to working out your recording setup without trying to get a good performance. Once you find a sound you like, just leave your equipment set up, or figure out how to set it up easily. I worked out my "best quality" setup so I can be ready to record in about 5 minutes. For my day to day recording, I just set my edirol on the table in front of the guitar and forget about getting ideal placement.
Don't bother stopping and starting your recorder in between takes, especially if it's digital. You can trim out the stuff you don't want later. Just get it going and start playing. If you want to do another take, just allow yourself some time to relax and start another. I find that stopping and starting the recorder in between takes turns into an opportunity to act out frustration and it can quickly become a downward spiral. Just let it roll.
Don't try to do a ton of takes of one piece in a row. If it's not happening after a few takes, take a break or record something else for a while. You can always come back to the first.

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PS: Speaking of recording, I've been looking forward to Marc Teicholz's "Valseanna" since GSI first announced it. I'd held off on buying it because I hoped that they might make it available for download, and lo and behold, it's now available on iTunes! This is a really sweet album, 18 waltzes played on 18 vintage guitars, although I'm not quite sure how Pepe Romero, Jr's 2004 guitar counts as vintage. I heard Teicholz play a few times when I lived in the SF Bay Area and really enjoyed it every time. He's such an unpretentiously expressive player. Check it out!

Pepe Romero & Joaquin Rodrigo

2010-12-24T03:00:00.000-08:00

Here are some videos which are somewhat buried on Youtube, that I find inspiring and insightful. Both feature Pepe Romero and Joaquin Rodrigo, a look into their working relationship, and a bit of the creative process behind these works.

The first offers some background about the famous Concierto de Aranjuez.

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This one is in Spanish. My spanish is weak but I was able to follow most of it well enough (at least until they get to the part about astronauts). It's about Concierto Para Una Fiesta, which is one of my favorite guitar concertos. It's not nearly as well known as the Aranjuez but to my taste, it's even better.

Book Review: Effortless Mastery

2010-12-17T04:00:00.000-08:00

"The effort it takes for you to perform music equals the distance between you and mastery"
- Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery.

In Effortless Mastery, Kenny Werner tells the story of his falling in love with music, being overwhelmed and hitting to rock bottom in music school, and how he picked up the pieces and put them together to become the master musician he is today.

He also gives you a clear, but thoroughly humbling, path to developing your own mastery of music.

It also comes with a CD with the author guiding you through four meditations with a veil of reverb and over a backdrop of tinkling piano. This can be really off-putting for some people (certainly for me, at first) but it's an essential part of his method and a very effective one at that.

Think of it as an attitude adjustment which most of us genuinely need. For me, it really helped break the cycle of frustration, to relax and enjoy the process.

Don't base your self-esteem of your music

It's really easy for a lot of us to get frustrated with ourselves when we fail. A lot of us try to play music that's too hard for us, or we want to play faster before our muscles develop the necessary coordination. Sometimes we prepare difficult music inadequately for performances and when the performance don't live up to our expectations, the aftermath can feel really awful.

Werner wants us to free ourselves from our judgment (there's a time and place for judgment, and it's not in the middle of a performance!), expectations, and desires - especially desire to be great, to improve, to not suck for just a few minutes... and open our ears and accept the sounds we are actually making. From this mental space of humility, honesty, and acceptance (yes, even of mistakes), we can begin to make progress.

Steps to Mastery

He presents a method for focused practicing that I won't describe, because you should really read the book and hear about it first hand. It is a humbling process, but from it, real progress can be made... and it can be applied to anything you work on.

You may be surprised at how fast or slow this progress comes, but you can be sure that it is genuine, and that's the best part. In time, you will be able to rely on yourself to perform your music perfectly, effortlessly, and without thought.

It works

This seems like quite an idealistic path but it is actually pretty realistic. We really can't force yourself to improve any faster than we're ready to, but there are a million obstacles we can set up for ourselves that will slow it down. Effortless Mastery is a simple plan for freeing ourselves of those obstacles.

The ideas in this book are not totally new or unique, but I like the way they are distilled to a simple and clear path. I think that most books in this genre say essentially the same things, but they say them in different ways, and some may resonate better with some readers than others. I will review others that I have read when I get a chance.

Measuring progress

2010-12-10T10:24:00.000-08:00

Tracking progress is a popular topic on guitar blogs I read. With all the day-to-day ups and downs, the best advice is to measure progress over the long term. Set some goals and work on them.

Keep revisiting something easy

Something you can do that is really fun and rewarding is to revisit your easiest repertoire. It's tempting, and OK, to leave the stuff behind as you progress. It'd be great to fully master every little bit of music before you move on, but there are so many facets of even the simplest music that you'd probably get overloaded or bored if you tried to do it all at once.

But hold on to that music. Pick something easy (preferably something you learned early on) pull out the music and play it a few times every 6 months or so. Even better, record it every six months and listen to your earlier recordings after you record it again. Compare them, see what has improved and what hasn't.

Notice how your phrasing has changed, notice how you start to make choices about things that you never even noticed before. If you recorded it, notice how your tone and timing improve.

Use it as a pick-me-up

Sometimes when I'm having rough day, I like to pull out something really familiar, like some simple Sor studies, and play them for a while. It helps me let go of my frustration and remind me of how good I'm able to sound. Then when I go back to my current music, I feel refreshed. It's a way of recalibrating.

That reminds me of something jazz bassist Sean Malone once said to me (or maybe I read it in an interview? I forget) to always start off practicing with something really easy that you can nail every time. It will set the tone for the rest of your practice.

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PS: I've rereleased another old recording of mine, November. It's an ambient electric guitar looping album I recorded about 10 years ago. If any of those words sound interesting to you, give it a listen :)

How to practice things that need a lot of repetition

2010-12-03T08:00:00.001-08:00

Some things you practice may require a lot of repetition to train your muscle memory. It's tempting to just keep repeating an exercise thinking you're going to build up strength, but little errors will compound and turn your playing to mush.

Here's an effective way to get things done:

Get a clear idea of what you're trying to do before you start. If you don't know what it should sound like, ask your teacher to demonstrate or find a recording of a piece which uses that technique.
Set your metronome to a speed where you can do the exercise as closely to that ideal as possible. When in doubt, err on the slow side.
Play the exercise a few times. Do it for maybe 10-15 seconds and stop. It's important, at this point, not to worry about how it sounds.
Take a break for a 10-15 seconds and relax. Recall that clear idea of what the exercise your playing should sound like.
Repeat steps 3 and 4 a few times, for about five or ten minutes.
Take a longer break. 2-3 minutes. Put the guitar down, stand up, think about something else for a bit.
Recall that ideal again. Repeat steps 3-6 until you run out of time or are ready to move on.

In your next practice session, begin again at step one. The trick is to do it as much as possible in the time you have, but take little breaks so you stay focused and don't get tired. The breaks also give things a chance to sink in.

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PS: I was recently contacted by Jason Wehr, another guitarist in town who saw my craigslist ad and liked my recordings. He sent me a link to his youtube channel and I liked his playing, so now we are working on duets together. Our first gig is December 8th at the Anacortes Museum, wish us luck!

Why every musician should compose

2010-11-26T08:00:00.001-08:00

Composing is a discovery process. When you compose even a bit, you learn about what goes through composers heads when they compose, and you will learn to interpret their music better. You will learn what makes music work (or not work).

I periodically go through phases where I am obsessed with the idea of composing. Usually, no more than a few sketches come out of it and few pieces get finished. It was frustrating until I considered that maybe I wasn't really trying to write the greatest guitar sonata ever, but instead I was examining my understanding of and relationship with music.

It's just like writing

You don't have to write a whole novel when you sit down at the word processor. You can start by jotting down an idea or two, maybe just vague notions in your head, and do your best to put them into words. As you do that, you may notice connections and ways that those ideas can fit together, or ways that they don't fit together.

Sometimes you need to write the same idea a few different ways before the right one appears. As the ball gets rolling, new ideas will appear on their own.

It's also like drawing

Don't tell me you can't draw. When you've got a blank piece of paper, you don't have to fill every sheet of paper with some painstakingly detailed landscape. You can sketch things out, or doodle. Sometimes just a stick man will do.

The hardest part is getting started.

Ever have a little fragment of a melody go through your head? Sing it. Find it on the instrument. Figure out some chords for it. If you can only find part of it, make up the rest. It doesn't have to be good, and if it's not, you don't have to play it someone else or even think about it ever again.

You don't even have to write it down, just play with it. What kind of accompaniment would Carulli give this melody? What about Villa-Lobos? How might Debussy have written it differently?

Note: Christopher Davis recently did a great interview with GFA winner Johannes Möller. In the second video, Johannes talks about composing. I wrote this post before I saw the video, so I'm happy to see some of the same sentiments but also some other great points of view. Check it out.

How to divide up practice time

2010-11-19T09:19:00.000-08:00

Dividing up practice time

Teachers usually recommend dividing up your practice time between technique, studies, and repertoire. Since there are a variety of techniques musicians master, so if you have only half hour to devote to technique, how should you divide that up?

Whether you have half an hour or three hours for your technique practice, I think you should pick the highest priority thing and just focus on that until you master it.

Move on when it is obvious you are ready to move on.

I am feeling the pressure of upcoming performances, but I am still spending most of my practice time on one scale, over and over again, for hours.

What about everything else?

What about arpeggios, tremolo, slurs, and all the other elements of technique? Aren't I ignoring those?

You could look at it that way, but there are and will probably always be aspects of my technique I'm not happy with. Right now, my playing will benefit the most from mastering my scales.

I would rather make a big improvement in one area of playing rather than making incremental improvements in several.

Boring?

This might seem really boring, but the truth is, two hours of scales a day was too boring for me when I was trying to concentrate on them as hard as I can.

Now I just do them while I read blogs/facebook/twitter/whatever.

When I'm ready to move on to music, I put the laptop away, get out my music, and get to work with a fresh mind. I'm tired mentally or physically from the scales.

In fact, I'll hardly feel like I've done them. That's pretty much the point. When you're playing music, you don't want to think, "here's that hard scale." You want to just do it. That is why I practice this way. In the past, I would have thought this was an awful idea, but as far as I'm concerned, the progress speaks for itself.

I'm not saying that I never listen to what I'm doing to check my progress. I'm always listening to it.

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PS: And now for something completely different. I recently completed an ambient/electronic/space music album under the name Glissant. Check it out!

What is efficient?

2010-11-12T09:09:00.000-08:00

"When working on the exercises, the guitarist must keep in mind the fact that mechanical repetition is worthless. Every time an exercise is repeated one must consciously correct and/or improve upon the previous playing."

- Ricardo Iznaola, Kitharalogus

"Practicing without thinking about what we’re doing prepares us for real world performance conditions, where we often have to work on automatic pilot mode, especially at the technical level.

I thought I was the only one doing this until a guitarist (and a famous one too, who will remain anonymous) came to visit Corpus Christi. When I went to the hotel to pick him up for the concert, I was surprised to hear, behind the door, intense practicing with the TV at full blast."

- Philip Hii, Art of Virtuosity for Guitar book

Both of these seemingly opposite schools of thought have their adamant supporters, and both have produced stellar musicians. How can that happen?

People are all different and some learn differently, but let's face it, not much about playing any instrument is particularly natural. Sure, some people take to it easier than others and we can use principles of nature to guide our efforts, but when it comes right down to it, everything we do is a learned adaptation to the requirements of the instrument. It will take time to develop.

Some will argue that 'mindless repetition' may not be taking the quickest path, and you are also perhaps running the risk of developing bad habits. But by letting your muscles figure things out on their own and leaving your mind out of it, you are cultivating the ability to play instinctively rather than calculatedly.

Iznaola's recommendation, on the other hand, can easily lead to end-gaining, which is often difficult to see until you're already mired in it. That doesn't mean the approach doesn't work, but I know that I tend to get obsessive about things and am prone to end-gaining, and I think that's why I have had mixed success with it.

Given the examples of success, I conclude that both approaches are valid and have their place, but perhaps aren't equally suited to everyone.

Efficiency IS Important

I'm not advocating wasting your time, and there are clearly times when efficiency is key. For example, the faster and more completely you understand a piece of music, the quicker and easier it should be to learn correctly. Having a secure and well-rounded technique will allow you to focus on the musical aspects of it without getting distracted by the technical side. That is efficient.

All the individual elements of your technique should be as efficient as possible, too. No wasted motion, no stumbling, and no delay as you prepare. While a thorough understanding of the ins and outs of technique is a great start, it offers little advantage until you put in the time imprinting the motions into your muscle memory so they become absolutely instinctive.

How long does it really take?

When I was working as a software engineer, the only times I could get a two-hour task done in two hours was when I had no interruptions. A ten minute interruption didn't make that task take two hours and ten minutes, it made it more like three hours, because of the distraction, the context-switching, and getting back into the groove.

So if a technique on the guitar is going to take 10 ideal-world hours to learn, the more time you can focus on it at a time, the sooner you'll get there. Every interruption will incur some penalty, so maybe doing it an hour a day will make it take 11-12 days, but doing it 10 minutes a day will probably take 70-80 days.

That is, if you can stay motivated and interested enough in working on that same thing 10 minutes a day for 70-80 days. If you're like most people, you'll probably get bored with it, or decide it's good enough for now, and move on to something else before you've really got it nailed down.

Mindless Repetition

One of the things I believe in is practicing in a state of no-mind. You practice without thinking too much about what you’re doing.

- Philip Hii, Art of Virtuosity for Guitar book

There's no real shortcut to developing technique. The closest thing to a shortcut is to have a clear sound-picture in your head of what you are trying to achieve, to have a sense of the right way, and guidance from a teacher.

Then you need to set your metronome for a speed where you are able to play the exercise/technique comfortably, no matter how slowly that is. Set a timer (I use http://e.ggtimer.com/) for 20-30 minutes, or an hour if you can, or even two, and just have at it. Work on one thing at a time and build the muscle memory until you get to the point where your hands just do it for you. You will know recognize that feels like when it happens. And if it doesn't sound right yet, keep at it.

Electric guitar, part 2

2010-11-05T10:31:00.000-07:00

It's quite a different experience, beginning again but with so many years of music experience behind me. It's not quite as fun as being a kid making loud noise for the first time but it's a lot more satisfying. Back then, I started off trying to learn Classical Gas on my mom's nylon string guitar to convince my parents they should buy me an electric guitar (which they did, even though my Classical Gas was unrecognizable), then a pile of guitar magazines and a vague sense of music carried me on from there.

The first order of business is learning to use a pick again. Why the death-grip on the pick and the tension in my forearm? Even if I lighten up the grip the tension remains. Is it just unfamiliar muscle work now and something that will go away on its own, or should I focus on this aspect right away since I'm aware of it?

The Guitar Mastery Blog covers a lot of picking-related issues with a good (and realistic) attitude.

Electric guitar, part 1

2010-10-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, I gave in to a long-suppressed urge and traded my flamenco guitar for an electric (thanks to Craigslist and Jason at the Shred Shed!). I'm not even sure yet what I am going to do with it. I don't even have an amp yet, so I've been playing it through Guitar Rig Player on my MacBook.

I confess that for the first few days it was a real distraction from my classical guitar practice. It's not the only reason, though; I've been putting a lot of energy into a new business venture, which is not a problem, but it has made me focus my guitar practice more into a few hours at the beginning of the day. That's when I prefer to work on guitar, anyway, but with a few nights of poor sleep, I found it harder to focus on the classical guitar stuff.

The real reason, and it's time to admit this to myself, is that I'd lost interest in the set of pieces I was working on. I worked on them last week with a lot of energy, but some of the details were far enough beyond my reach that I ended up practicing the fun out of them. It's good music, but I just need to come back to it later. In the meantime, I've been relearning how to play electric guitar.

A piece from Joseph Miller

2010-10-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

I found this while searching SoundCloud for classical guitar. I have worked with some students in a class I TA'd for a while on this piece, and I thought it was kind of nice but failed to really appreciate it until I heard this recording. I know nothing about this Joseph Miller guy, but I enjoyed his recordings. Check him out.

Rose in a Garden - Carlo Domeniconi by JosephMillerGuitar

exploring a piece

2010-10-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

I'm hanging out in Montana right now, visiting Glacier NP and hanging out with my parents. I brought my guitar, but I've got a lot of projects in the works, so throwing in all the hiking and stuff is limiting my guitar time. So, I decided to pick a piece (Brouwer's Ojos Brujos) that's not long or hard but has some challenges, and explore it. I've played through each voice separately, tried a variety different fingerings for each part of it, ways to play the repeated sections differently, thought about the transitions between sections, etc. As a result, I've gotten most of it memorized without giving any thought to memorizing it, and I've also come up with some unexpected fingerings that help smooth out things I had trouble with and make the melodies sing nicely, too.

I've enjoyed this approach, just getting to know the piece inside and out before committing it to memory. I suppose that if I needed to work up a piece on a short deadline, this approach may not be the best, but I've been able to learn a lot from it.

Brouwer's Estudios Sencillos

2010-10-11T08:07:00.000-07:00

This is a quick buyer-beware; you can still find the Brouwer studies in 4 short, very expensive volumes in lots of music stores. You can also find ALL 20 of them, plus a bunch of other great music he wrote, in one book, for the price of one of the individual volumes.

Concert Review

2010-10-03T14:53:00.000-07:00

I wrote a guest post for the Classical Guitar Blog about Jorge Caballero's concert in Seattle last night.

I have to say, I miss the concert halls in the SF Bay Area. Petit Trianon and Herbst theater had really great acoustics, but I am not impressed with Benaroya Hall in Seattle. It just doesn't work as well for guitar.

Recording: Sor Studies

2010-09-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

I want to make a point of recording myself more often and getting comfortable in front of a mic, so I am planning to record something at least once a week when possible. Today, I sat down with my book of Sor Studies and recorded a few that I have worked on occasionally. I've never really tried to memorize these studies, but I have worked on more than half of them in the book and I like to just come back to them from time to time and apply whatever new things I've learned since the last time. They're perpetually works in progress for me, but I am not particularly interested in performing them so I just use them to see how I'm doing. There's always something new to discover in them, and there's an awful lot of them, so I consider it one of the best bang-for-buck guitar books I've ever bought.

My recording setup and my Extreme Isolation Headphones let me listen to myself as the mic hears me even as I'm playing, because the sound of the guitar in the room doesn't bleed through so much into the headphones. Normally, I hate that, because it sounds weird without the room acoustics. But I realized today that it's a handy tool for practicing, as well; it lets you hear what you're doing approximately as an audience would. It makes it obvious how much you need to exaggerate things like tone color changes, dynamics, etc in order to get them across to the listener.

Here's today's recording:

Fernando Sor: Studies Op. 44 no. 11, Op. 60 no. 7, Op. 44 no. 9 by wbajzek

Some thoughtful quotes from an interview with a horror writer

2010-09-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

This is from an interview with Thomas Ligotti, a modern horror writer who's one of my favorite authors. I think that what he has to say about writing a story applies just as well to the process of composing or studying and performing music:

I’ve always had to know enough about the story I’m going to write and be enthusiastic about it to make it worth the bother to write the thing in the first place. So I meditate on it, make tons of notes, ask myself if there is something missing from the story that should be there or something that’s there and shouldn’t be, and rack my brain to take the idea of the story to the farthest limit it will allow. Satisfied that the story will be worth writing, I start writing it. In the process, I usually come up with better ideas than I had originally planned. If that didn’t happen, the story would only be adequate, as a number of my stories have been. It’s not possible to plan every metaphor and structural aspect ahead of time, of course. I’ve had to trust that my abilities in these areas won’t let me down.

Here's another interesting quote from his answer to the preceding question.

Then I read Poe and Lovecraft for the first time and found what I didn’t know I was looking for: writers who put themselves on every page of their work, who wrote like personal essayists and lyric poets. Every fiction writer I’ve ever admired wrote in this manner.

A lot of emphasis gets put on respecting composers' intentions and studying scores carefully, but in the end most of the the best and most widely respected and listened-to performers are known better because they put themselves into everything that they play. If you compare Barrueco and Williams playing a piece, I am sure they both are attempting to convey the meaning of the score, but in the end they always sound like themselves.

Some thoughts on interpretation

2010-09-23T14:14:00.000-07:00

I've been playing Heitor Villa-Lobos's Prelude 3 for about 3 months now. You can hear this morning's recording of it in my previous post; usually I play it twice (as written) but it's a tricky piece to pull off that way. I read a quote recently (I think) from Antigoni Goni, which I can no longer find, where she said something to the effect of, "when part of a piece repeats, just as we are all changed by the passage of time." I think she's a real master of this idea, by the way; I am very fond of her recordings and it sounds to me like she never plays anything the same way twice. Every repeated section has some new facet or insight.

Back to Prelude 3. This is an oddly formed piece in which the entire thing repeats, and the second page of it repeats as well; the long pedal segment gets repeated four times if you play it all as written. What is one to do with that?

Another interesting thing is that yesterday I sat down with the score and listened to nearly a dozen recordings of it, not a single one plays it exactly as written, rhythmically. Note values are lengthened, shortened, etc, in the extreme. I'm not talking about a little rubato; I mean, sometimes what is written as a half note gets played as an 8th or 16th. Furthermore, if one DOES play it exactly as written, it sounds kind of flat. Some parts sound rushed, others will sound like they come in very late.

The question is, what did HVL intend when he wrote it? Did he mean for it to be played so romantically, but wrote it the way he did to make it fit the notational constructs properly? Or has the tradition of playing it romantically overshadowed what's written in the score? Of course, there are segments were, dynamically, many performers do the exact opposite of what the composer calls for, and it's hard to make the case that they are following his intention that way.

The point I am getting at is, what's most important? The composer's intention or the performer's own style? I'm not so sure that's even what really matters; I think the most important thing is that the performer is convinced by the interpretation they use and the audience will pick up on that and it will communicate the them. Otherwise, if the performer is unconvinced, how can the audience be?

Something different: recording the guitar at home

2010-09-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

I felt like I needed to do some recording, to try to get more gigs, so I started working on that this week. Recording guitar is tricky, especially at home and on a limited budget. I record using my Edirol R-09HR, which is incredibly handy and easy to use. I think it's a great field recorder, but I haven't been happy with its internal mics for recording guitar. Let's face it, the guitar's just not all that loud, and so you either need very sensitive mics, or you need to mic the instrument really closely. These things have resulted in too much background noise, or an unnatural guitar sound.

A few months ago I bought a pair of Naiant X-W mics, which are very affordable and sound great. I have had great success with them for recording flute and fiddle, and recently, my wife's piano trio (piano, violin, cello). These are pretty loud instruments, though, which the guitar isn't. I was still running into the same problem; I had to mic the guitar pretty closely, or get too much background noise. This recording of En Los Trigales was done that way; the mics are about 20 inches away from the guitar, spaced about 6 inches (which, having only one stand, is all I can manage at this point). It is pretty good but, given the mics sensitivity, the echo of my room became a problem on the staccato passages. I masked this a bit by using some digital reverb; in this case, it was TC Electronic's free M30 reverb. In hindsight, I think I used too much and I don't think it sounds very natural. Once upon a time, I had a TC Electronic G-Force, and their PerformanceVerb reverb plugin and loved them. I hate to say it, but I don't think the newer plugin sounds as good.

Joaquin Rodrigo: En Los Trigales by wbajzek

Today, I did some more recording with a different setup; I switched to my CAD m179 mic, set to the hypercardioid pickup pattern. This is a very sensitive mic with a fairly flat response (compared to other mics I have owned), and using this pickup pattern I was able to avoid some of the echo from the side walls. This let me move the mic back to about 3.5 feet away, and I think it picked up the full range of the guitar very clearly without problematic background noise or room echoes.

I was skeptical about recording the guitar in mono, even though I am really fascinated by mono recordings. I knew it could be done but until today I'd never achieved a satisfactory sound that way. In this case, it does sound a bit brighter than I think my guitar actually sounds, but I left that alone, figuring it would just help make the recording clear. It picked up the bass really nice, I think.

I used digital reverb again; this time, the free Lernvall Audio LAConvolver plugin with an impulse response file recorded in a church somewhere. I am really pleased with how this round of recordings turned out; unfortunately it still suffers from ambient sounds, like cars driving by and stuff, but for demo purposes, that's OK. Such is life. I actually had to call it a day as the garbage truck arrived and I knew that the rest of the morning was going to be filled with beeping and crashing noises.

The following two tracks in this post were recorded with this setup. I plan to do more soon, and will experiment further... I may be able to get away with moving the mic a little further away from the guitar, which would help tone down things like nail noises and string squeaks which would not be so prominent in a performance anyway.

Heitor Villa-Lobos: Prelude 3 by wbajzek

I will continue posting clips to my Soundcloud page as I complete them. So far, all of them have been recorded with my Robert Garcia "'37 Hauser" model guitar, with an adirondack spruce top and indian rosewood back and sides. I'm just crazy about this guitar, and love playing it.

Leo Brouwer: Estudios Sencillos 1 & 2 by wbajzek

Recent gig post-mortem

2010-09-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

I gave a couple of solo performances this past weekend, for the first time in a few years. They went great! The first was as background music for a reception at my local library. It sort of fell out of the sky for me, was a nice warm-up opportunity for me as it happened to be on the night before my scheduled recital. Aside from the incredible hospitality of my hosts, I had some nice comments from the attendees, and found that many of them gathered around me rather than away from me. Always a good sign! Background music gigs are sometimes a bit awkward but I was made to feel very welcome.

The following day, I played at the Burlington, WA public library's concert series. I had seen Noteworthy Duo there a few months ago, and felt like it was a surprisingly great place to perform. It has a very welcoming atmosphere and great acoustics. I am a big believer in the intimacy of live performances and would generally prefer a house concert over a large hall any day, and this place has a living room -like feel to it with acoustics that allow you to hear the music clearly anywhere in the large room.

I played the following program:

J. S. Bach: Cello Suite 3 BWV1009
Heitor Villa-Lobos: Etude 1
Heitor Villa-Lobos: Prelude 3
Agustin Barrios Mangore: La Catedral
Leo Brouwer: Dos Aires Populares Cubanos
Joaquin Rodrigo: En Los Trigales

Aside from the Barrios and Rodrigo, these were all pieces that are new to me as of this year. How did they go? Well, I really like the Brouwer pieces but they didn't seem to fit, somehow. Perhaps they would have been better before La Catedral, to break up the mood a bit, but I have to admit, they just don't feel like "my" pieces. I no longer plan to keep them in my concert repertoire. Brouwer is one of my favorite composers, though, and very influential to my approach to the guitar, so his music will continue to play a role in my repertoire.

I had actually prepared Rodrigo's Sonata a la Espanola, as well, and I wish now that I had played it. The main reason that I didn't was that somehow I managed to go well over-time before I got to it, which is odd because with it, I had clocked my rehearsal performances at 61 minutes. It means that a bit of tuning and a few brief words in between pieces and perhaps a some slower than intended tempi filled up more time than I would have guessed. On the other hand, I still felt a little uneasy about the last movement of the Sonata, and everything that I did play I was able to play with total conviction.

I suppose that is one of the big differences between these performances and the ones I did several years ago; I haven't necessarily studied this music for as long, but I have done so more thoroughly and confidently than before. Part of that comes from the experience I have amassed in the years since, but a lot of it is a change in approach, too.

I have come to understand and appreciate in a deep way, the importance of one's frame of mind while studying, practicing, listening, and performing. This is a direct influence of Kevin Gallagher on me and he writes about it quite a bit on his blog. I think that for me it boils down to the fact that I can have an understanding and intention in mind before I play, and I can look back critically on what I played, but when I play I need to just trust myself to do what I have trained to do. In essence, I played these two performances the same way I play irish flute in social situations ((non-jam) sessions), which is that I listened and enjoyed the music while my body did the work for me.

I think that this is what all accomplished performers do, and is kind of a prerequisite to real musical communication, which I believe I was able to achieve at least some of the time. Everything I have read or heard about performing well can be rephrased or interpreted in this way. For me, it's something new; I have been working on it all year and started finally breaking through the inner-critic and other barriers I've set up over the years and I'm happy to say that these were the best solo-guitar performances I've ever given because I was able to listen to and enjoy every note I played as clearly as if someone it was someone else playing it for me.

Things that bear repeating...

2010-07-16T16:38:00.000-07:00

I just read a nice blog post from Bob Wooldridge about a concert and workshop given by Jorge Caballero at the GFA convention. There was a nice quote in it:

The workshop started out with Jorge simply asking if anyone had any technical problems that they would like to discuss. But I believe that Jorge was engaging in a somewhat Socratic attempt to shake up our thinking. Several things were suggested as technical problems. Tension, scale velocity, tone, etc.. but Jorge's answer was that these were not really technical but musical. In other words, almost all technical problems are fundamentally musical in nature!

In fact, my teacher Kevin Gallagher said pretty much the same thing to me in my lesson today. I really believe it, and for me it's one of those things that I was starting to grasp and then suddenly it seems like the whole world is shouting it at me.

I can give a really concrete example for it. For a while I've felt like I just wasn't getting out of my guitar what I knew it was capable, in terms of volume and tone. For a while I thought it was because I was trying a different nailshape and wasn't used to it yet, or hadn't gotten it quite right yet. Kevin pointed out to me in a lesson that I was missing some notes in faster passages, or at times they were there but not consistent with the surrounding notes. I started paying a lot more attention to the consistency of volume and tone, not so that everything was even really but so that it fit in better with the "trajectory" of the line. So if I meant to play a line at a given volume level, that all the notes fit in, or if I was making a decrescendo, that each note had the right volume and tone for its place in the line.

Of course it helped right away, but the best thing about this was that it made me pay a lot more attention to the sound I was producing. It made me take the time to listen to things like chords and arpeggios. Did each note in the chord have the right "weight" behind it? Did the voices within the chords sound connected to the adjacent chords, as with the single-note lines mentioned before? Without these details in place, the sound gets unfocused and deteriorates.

Now, this is the kind of thing that if I were to try to think about every detail while I was playing a piece, I wouldn't be able to play it. But in practice, I could take it a bit at a time and start building the correct habit. Obviously, there was technique involved in solving these problems, but the reality is that technique wouldn't make sense without the musical context and that educating the ear and letting the rest follow is often a much easier way to accomplish thing than to focus closely on the mechanical aspect and risk getting distracted from the result.

The result has been that I feel like I'm producing a lot more sound with the guitar, although the reality may be that it seems louder because the music is coming through more clearly. To use another metaphor, you could look at it like an improvement in the signal to noise ratio.

Conflicting advice

2010-06-18T08:27:00.000-07:00

This is a tricky one. I have a moderate-sized collection of guitar method books, which I like because there's always something interesting to learn from a good one. Sometimes just one new insight can make it worthwhile.

Lately, I've been pondering "The Art of Classical Guitar Playing" by Charles Duncanwhich is loaded with really interesting insight and what sounds, at first glance, like advice which conflicts with other methods I have read. While many authors write about staying as relaxed as possible while playing, Duncan talks about maintaining functional tension (that is, tension which helps your playing) and avoiding dysfunctional tension (which hinders your playing).

This is a bit of a paraphrase, but one specific example I can think of is where he says "an effective playing position is not so much a repose as it is an equilibrium of forces." Meaning that he recommends that rather than finding a totally loose, passive way of holding the guitar, that you instead should use the natural springiness of the body to hold things solidly in place. However, if you were to force yourself into a position resembling the photo in the book without understanding the method behind it, you could very well end up using a lot of dysfunctional tension to maintain that position.

It occurred to me recently, in an email discussion with Philip Hii about his Art of Virtuosity books, that the main differences between what these authors are saying could largely be a matter of terminology and perception. After all, if you truly eliminated all tension in your body, you would pretty much just fall down in a heap. Where one author may say "relaxed," another may say "using balanced forces." This shouldn't be a big revelation but it may account for why seemingly opposite approaches can produce virtuosic results for different authors. They may not really be opposite at all, when you get down to the actual intended experience of playing.

This is why I think that while books have their place, the best "method" is still to find a good teacher and keep an open mind.

Pepe Romero & Wilhelm Hellweg play Carulli and Diabelli

2010-06-15T16:00:00.000-07:00

This is a recording I really love.

I was really happy to stumble upon it when I did... I don't even remember how I found it, but I have listened to it time and time again and am always inspired by it. I hope it gets a proper CD release some day, along with the rest of Pepe's back catalog.

Visualization followup

2010-06-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

I think that unless I have the time to devote my full undivided attention to this process, it's probably best to work in small chunks, probably with overlap. I went for an hour-long walk yesterday and tried to mentally play through the whole Bach cello suite, but it was too hard to maintain my attention with all the sensory input of being outdoors walking around town. I found myself easily distracted by things like crossing the street and trying not to get hit by cars. :)

Visualization

2010-06-14T14:17:00.000-07:00

This topic comes up an awful lot, and I'm not going to go into too much detail about the process, per se. Here is a good article on it from Richard Provost's book The Art and Technique of Practice to get you started if you don't know what I mean.

I've been working on Bach's cello suite #3, and as of a week and a half ago, I considered myself successful in memorizing the whole thing... Which was a nice accomplishment for me, since it's the longest single work I have committed to memory so far with the intention to perform. Well, in anticipation of my lesson last week, I recorded it for my teacher and frankly, it was a bit of a disaster.

At first I tried to rationalize it, saying the music is still new to me, and it was first thing in the morning with no warmup, and, being doubtful of the security of my memory, I had the music in front of me "just in case." I didn't put too much stock in the disastrous nature of this recording, because of those factors, but during the lesson it dawned on me that it probably WAS as well as I could have expected to perform it for an audience. There are all sorts of factors going on which can affect a performance, and the reality was that my memory of the piece was not strong enough to pull it off.

That's OK, because the performance is still months away, but I decided to accept this wake up call and get to work on it. I have been using a visualization process in which I play through each movement continuously in my head; hearing each note and feeling the correct fingering for each hand, without hesitation. This means that, for the left hand, I try to "feel" shapes, shifts, and stretches, too, even though my hands are not actually moving. And this, I think is the key; I have used visualization techniques before in the past but (and I thank Eloise Ristad's A Soprano on Her Head: Right-Side-Up Reflections on Life and Other Performances for my current understanding of it) now I am adding this specific muscle "pre-memory" aspect with great success. It has hard to say what is actually going on; it is sort of muscle memory, in that I think you need familiarity with the right kinds of motions to do this, but really what you are doing is imagining what it feels like to go through the motions of playing.

The big "a ha!" for me was after I went through this process for the entire suite twice, once before bed and a second time after I woke up in the morning but before I got up. I got up, had breakfast, went to my practice room and played the entire suite. At first, it was slightly shaky in the prelude, but soon I fell right into the music and played through the whole thing better than I ever have before.

It was not a flawless run-through and I think it would be too much to hope for perfection overnight no matter how many examples the "technique of performance" and similar books use of instantaneous success after a spontaneous insight. Truthfully, I fell a bit short of the "without hesitation" goal even in the visualization process, but that is part of the point; I found where I didn't know the music as well as I should, and was perhaps relying on muscle memory along when playing.

The important thing, though, is that with few exceptions, in that run-through I felt like I could trust my body to play do the motions of playing the music correctly, and I felt more free to perform from my imagination rather than my technique. What's more is that I found that I was more relaxed as I played, breathing easily and playing more effortlessly than before. Whether that came from the sense of security, or the fact that it didn't occur to me to visualize being tense, I don't know. :)

I felt so good about this experience, that I have made it a primary means of working on the music. My approach now is to work through music like this away from the guitar, reinforcing my memory of the piece until I can play it without hesitation. I do this as close to performance tempo as I can manage without losing sight of the details. When I do play on the guitar, I play through as slowly and deliberately as I need to be sure to do it correctly. If something goes wrong, I go over that section again correctly afterwards on its own and then with surrounding context from the piece.

My aim is to do the visualization work and slow practice daily, and play through once at performance tempo after 3-4 times I have played through slowly, to test the process. The process can feel a bit tedious and I think it's important to be able to see and enjoy the progress to maintain the motivation to keep it up.

I began this particular experiment last Tuesday, June 8th. I'll report back on how it's going in another week or two.

Coordination vs control

2010-05-25T13:32:00.000-07:00

Today I managed to increase my scale speed by nearly 20%. I've done a lot of right hand work lately, but what seems to have done it today is a shift in thinking, to use relaxed sympathetic motion instead of trying to 'activate' the fingers individually. In other words, instead of thinking of i&m alternating, to move them as a unit led by one or the other, and conceptually, aiming for relaxed coordination rather than exerted control.

I put together an exercise to work on this, which has done the trick for me. Work on each group separately, lightly and quickly as possible, and preparing each motion at the earliest opportunity. Feel each repetition as a single impulse, and allow yourself to relax completely after each rep before repeating. Don't worry about working with a metronome, just see how fast you can do it. When it feels natural, try some scales and try to maintain the same mental and physical state.

This is a different way of working than I presented in my recent post about developing the right hand. I am having dramatically faster results with this new way of working, but I can't say for sure whether it should replace the other way or be used in tandem.

Possibility

2010-05-01T16:30:00.000-07:00

I'm reading another frustrating forum discussion about "am I limited because of ____"? The usual answers equate to, "of course you are. Just enjoy living within your limitation." The implied message is, "why even try?"

Think of these two statements:
a) My potential is inevitably limited.
b) My potential is eventually unlimited.

Which is more likely to get you motivated?

Developing the right hand

2010-03-16T09:23:00.000-07:00

I found some pieces recently I would like to learn with tremolo passages, but I've never had a good tremolo in spite of years of attempting various techniques for working on it. My new theory is that I need to develop the weaker side of my hand, and I've come up with a good way to work on that which is working great so far.

The first set of exercises begins with playing 1-2-3-4 with the left hand. Starting on the 6th string at the first fret, 1-2-3-4, repeat on the 5th string, 4th, 3rd, 2nd, 1st, then up a fret and back across string by string to the 6th. Repeat this pattern all the way up the neck until you have the 4th finger at the 1st string 12th fret. From there, the pattern is reversed, descending 4-3-2-1 and descending back down the neck the same way it was climbed. You should end with the 1st finger on the first fret on the 6th string again. This is a fairly standard pattern of exercise which most will recognize right away.

The right hand fingering with this is a strictly repeated a-m-i the whole way. So beginning on the 6th strings, you'll play a-m-i-a, then on the 5th, m-i-a-m, i-a-m-i on the 4th, etc. I do this all with light rest strokes to keep the motions small and precise. If you're like me, you'll probably find that it becomes more difficult to coordinate this on the way back down the neck when the left hand pattern is reversed. I think this is because the brain will at first decide that both hands are playing the same pattern, and you will need to do the exercise slowly enough to gently and carefully convince your mind that the patterns are in fact separate. As this becomes comfortable, you can use different left-hand patterns... 1-3-2-4 ascending with 4-2-3-1 descending, 1423/3241, 1432/2341, etc.

The first exercise doesn't have to be completely mastered before going on but I think it's worth developing that for a while first. The next exercise uses exactly the same left hand fingerings as the first, but the right hand uses p-a-m-i for each group of four for the entire exercise. As that become comfortable, try (again with the same left hand pattern) using a-m-i-p for each group of four, then m-i-p-a and finally i-p-a-m. This will present tricky string crossings which will take a while to master.

The next step along the way is to practice scales using these same right-hand fingering patterns. This will again make for a variety of tricky string crossings and it will take some time to get comfortable with them. I begin with the standard "Segovia" fingerings for the scales and then progress from there, perhaps as follows although I think that there will be diminishing returns when it comes to spending a lot of time progressing through similar patterns.

i-m
m-i
i-a
a-i
m-a
a-m
a-m-i
m-i-a
i-a-m
i-m-a
m-a-i
a-i-m
i-m-a-m
m-a-m-i
a-m-i-m
m-i-m-a
p-a-m-i
a-m-i-p
m-i-p-a
i-p-a-m

As you go through these exercises, periodically try some simple tremolo exercises to see how you are progressing. I've come to believe a sentiment expressed by teacher Paul Croft on the Delcamp.net classical guitar forum, essentially that good tremolo follows from good right hand technique. I don't mean to say you shouldn't practice tremolo on its own, but the exercises I've presented above are designed to develop the kinds of coordination and concentration that will help build that balanced right hand technique. I have personally made quicker progress by practicing this regimen than I had by practicing Giuliani arpeggios and tremolo in isolation.

One last thing I want mention is that a lot of us succumb to the temptation to mainly use p, i, and m for most of our music. Indeed, a lot guitar music particularly in the early stages is playable without making substantial use of a. I think it is worth fingering pieces so that a is used as frequently as m and i, if possible. Even if it is not necessary to the piece, it will be a great benefit to one's technique overall.

This post owes a debt of gratitude to Alice Artzt's book, "The Art of Practicing." In it, she describes more or less the same kinds of exercises, and a system for devising many more along the same lines. The exercises I presented here are inspired by her method and are ones that have been working well for me so far.

Work on your weaknesses

2009-04-20T10:47:00.001-07:00

This is something that took me a long time to fully appreciate, but it's really helpful to spend more practice time on your weaknesses than the things that are already easy. I wanted to improve the speed of my scales, so I just practiced my strongest right hand fingering (i & m alternation) figuring that I would just use that fingering anyway, so why waste time practicing the others? Eventually I started devoting more time the weaker combinations, particular m & a, and as a result the independence between my fingers and the overall relaxation of the hand improved tremendously. My whole technique improved much more rapidly than before, including the speed and (more importantly) the ease of my scales, and it gave a big boost to my confidence with the instrument as well.

A technique to develop relaxation

2009-04-13T10:37:00.001-07:00

While it's true that there is a component of strength necessary when playing guitar, excessive tension and overuse of strength are common problems amongst guitarists. A practice technique I have been using to address this is to play a particularly tiring piece without actually pushing the strings down. My right hand operates as normal, the left hand fingers touch the strings at exactly the right point of the string, with right spot on the finger, in order to play each note cleanly, but it should remain so relaxed that it doesn't push the strings onto the frets.

When trying this, go very slowly and make sure you get every motion right. In your mind's ear, listen closely to the notes that would be played if you did touch the strings to the frets. I often find that by the end of the piece, I have begun to actually play the notes with my left hand so relaxed that it perceives almost no effort. When this happens, I try to internalize that feeling in my hand and maintain it as I continue to play.