Unforgiving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.