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.
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. 
, 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.
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.