Here is a video I just recorded of Mallorca, one of my favorite pieces by Albéniz. I think it is one of the guitar repertoire’s most beautiful and evocative pieces, despite the fact that it was written for piano. It’s a relatively new piece for me, though I’ve grown up listening to it. When I first learned it, I worked from the editions of many guitarists (Andrés Segovia, Julian Bream, Rafael Andia, David Russell, Abel Carlevaro, and many others) and consulted the piano score. And, once there were too many scribbles on all those editions, I decided to create my own edition to suit my hands and taste. As always, it is a work in progress that I enjoy playing quite a bit.
Here is Part 4 of a new series of guided warm-ups for my students and Six String Journal readers. In these guided warm-ups, I’ll go through some of the most important drills to help you establish a good routine for warming up before practicing your repertoire.
So go grab your guitar and get comfortable. In this second video, I’ve set the metronome for quarter = 60. We’ll go through the third part of my go-to slur routine, which involves three and four-note slurs (124, 134, 123, 234, 1234). For the right hand, I simply use p for strings 6, 5, and 4, and then use i, m, and a for strings 3, 2, and 1. Follow along, stay aware of good form, stay relaxed, and stick with it until you can start to increase tempo with a good foundation.
If you’re a beginner, take it slowly and don’t wear your hand out. Pause occasionally for rest and let your hand catch up. It might help to just watch the first few minutes to get a sense of how it unfolds for the fingers.
I’m in the process of creating a new series of guided warm-ups for my students. Here is Part 3 for Six String Journal readers. In these guided warm-ups, I’ll go through some of the most important drills to help you establish a good routine for warming up before practicing your repertoire.
So go grab your guitar and get comfortable. In this second video, I’ve set the metronome for quarter = 60. We’ll go through the second part of my go-to slur routine, which involves compound slurs (121, 232, 343, 131, 242, 141). For the right hand, I simply use p for strings 6, 5, and 4, and then use i, m, and a for strings 3, 2, and 1. Follow along, stay aware of good form, stay relaxed, and stick with it until you can start to increase tempo with a good foundation.
If you’re a beginner, take it slowly and don’t wear your hand out. Pause occasionally for rest and let your hand catch up. It might help to just watch the first few minutes to get a sense of how it unfolds for the fingers.
I’m in the process of creating a new series of guided warm-ups for my students. Here is Part 2 for Six String Journal readers. In these guided warm-ups, I’ll go through some of the most important drills to help you establish a good routine for warming up before practicing your repertoire.
So go grab your guitar and get comfortable. In this second video, I’ve set the metronome for quarter = 60. We’ll go through the first part of my go-to slur routine. For the right hand, I simply use p for strings 6, 5, and 4, and then use i, m, and a for strings 3, 2, and 1. Follow along, stay aware of good form, stay relaxed, and stick with it until you can start to increase tempo with a good foundation.
If you’re a beginner, take it slowly and don’t wear your hand out. Pause occasionally for rest and let your hand catch up. It might help to just watch the first few minutes to get a sense of how it unfolds for the fingers.
I’m in the process of creating a new series of guided warm ups for my students. Here is part 1 for Six String Journal readers. In these guided warm ups, I’ll go through some of the most important drills to help you establish a good routine for warming up before practicing your repertoire.
So go grab your guitar and get comfortable. In this first video I’ve set the metronome for quarter = 60. We’ll string cross with single and pairs of fingers and go through a great slur routine with all the pairs of left hand fingers. For the right hand, I simply use p for strings 6, 5, and 4, and then use i, m, and a for strings 3, 2, and 1. Follow along, stay aware of good form, stay relaxed, and stick with it until you can start to increase tempo with a good foundation.
I recently recorded several of my favorite pieces by Paraguayan composer, Agustín Barrios Mangoré. Here are two of them, well-loved and well-known to most of you. Julia Florida was the first Barrios piece I learned decades ago and I still love playing it. And, of all of Barrios’s waltzes, his Vals Op.8, Nº3 is probably my favorite. Thank you to Stefan Nitschke for such a beautiful sounding guitar.
This is the first of five wonderful preludes by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. With his gift for sorrowful lyrical melodies to the rhythmic and joyful interlude with its changing meters and Spanish flair, Villa Lobos creates a true guitar masterpiece which fully exploits the richness, emotional depth, and colors of the guitar. Hope you enjoy it.
Happy New Year! If your New Year’s resolution is to improve your tremolo, you are in luck!
The Bolton Guitar Series just posted its workshop on tremolo with David Russell. Before summarizing it for those of you who like to see the main points listed as a reference, I thought I’d repeat what I expressed in the recent post about David Russell’s ornamentation workshop: the generosity in sharing absolutely everything he knows about his journey with guitar in such an enthusiastic and articulate way is extremely inspiring. David Russell is a great teacher, even through zoom!
Here is the video of the tremolo workshop:
David Russell Tremolo Workshop Main Points
Each finger/nail should feel and sound the same.
Tremolo is a good diagnostic technique for other technical issues.
Maintain a regular rhythm.
Bass should be balanced. Gentle bass/medium or strong treble.
Stiffness in the right hand fingers makes noise. Looseness in the right hand equals a less “clickly” sound. Straighter fingers also help with lessening the “clicky” sound of nails.
The a finger introduces a new tremolo/melodic note and requires attention.
Sympathetic motion between a and m can lead to rhythmic irregularities. Lengthen a finger duration to insure full value of note.
Shift metronome beats to each finger when practicing to “think” with each finger and especially a.
What you do musically with tremolo is at least as important as mechanical perfection.
Practice contrasting Slow/fast, dark/bright, soft/loud practice.
Certain pieces require slow tremolo, some require faster tremolo.
Tremolo pieces:
Recuerdos de la Alhambra and Sueño (Francisco Tárrega)
Zafra and Simancas from Castillos de España (Federico Moreno Torroba)
Una limosna por el amor de Diós, Un sueño en la floresta, Contemplación, Canción de la Hilandera (Agustín Barrios Mangoré)
Invocación y danza and Junto al Generalife (Joaquín Rodrigo)
Reverie and Air Varié (Giulio Regondi)
Now and Ever (Bejamin Verdery)
Shenandoah (Robert Beaser)
Capricho Diabolico (Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco)
Variations on Las Folias (Manuel Maria Ponce)
Campanas del Alba (Regino Sainz de la Maza)
Tips from Questions and Answers:
Play with energy and the necessary tension but more than that is wasted energy and effort. Poise and posture to maximize energy.
Practice tremolo with two fingers (pimi, pmim, pama, pmam, etc…)
Do not bounce hand!
Planting a stops the tremolo. Join all the notes for a better tremolo.
Try playing paaa tremolo to assess tone, movement of a.
Finger movement remains mostly within the span of string space (i.e for tremolo on string 2, a, m and i do not extend beyond strings 1 or 3).
Raise your expectations of yourself. Do not accept bad playing!
A renewed Scarlatti obsession, hearing French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau, and a recent David Russell workshop posted by the Bolton Guitar Series have me thinking about ornamentation on the guitar more than usual.
It’s been about 25 years since I took several masterclasses with David Russell in a tiny Andean village in Venezuela. Besides being a tremendously talented guitarist, David is a wonderful teacher: clear, patient, and able to make you sound better almost instantly. I learned a lot from him there and fortunately have continued to learn from him over the years thanks to videos of him working with students throughout the world. In the video (linked below), David explains his approach to ornamentation very clearly and demonstrates every example with his guitar. If you have lots of time, watch it and extract as much as you can! Here I’ll summarize the points I took away after watching it this morning.
Here is a summary of the basic cross-stringed ornaments and the common (and maybe not so common) ways to execute them (the repeated right hand finger is a sweep):
And here are some of the points David mentions in the workshop:
Most baroque trills begin on the upper neighbor.
A brighter sound is better for ornaments. This can be achieved by attacking the string with less of a right-hand angle or by angling the right hand to a more perpendicular angle to the strings.
Cadential trills are important but ornaments within the piece are more personal as to their inclusion, length, etc…
Practice the entrances and exits of ornaments with turns.
Mute the dissonance after the trill. This is usually done with a right-hand finger.
Dynamics are important within the ornament and the musical line.
A shorter trill is better than a longer out of rhythm trill unless it is cadential (where time is suspended to a greater degree)
Cross-string ornaments allow baroque interpretations to vary stylistically from other periods of music.
Have a higher wrist for trills.
Here are a few additional points that I cannot remember whether they are in the workshop but that I think about:
The ornamented note should be in time. In order to achieve this a slight acceleration into the ornament or starting the ornament before the beat helps to achieve the correct feel.
Hailing from Portugal, the talented Rebeca Oliveira recently sat down to share some insight over the course of her journey with guitar so far. There is a lot of wonderful advice for young and old players alike in this interview. Hope it is inspiring to all of you.
Personal
When did you start playing and why? Or, what drew you to the guitar initially?
I started to play classical guitar when I was 15 years old. Actually when I think about it, I can’t find the precise moment where I decided that I wanted to learn guitar or become a musician… Before I played Piano but I didn’t want to continue with the lessons, so my mother pushed me into guitar lessons, so I could keep learning music. It just started like a Hobby and at some point I got really interested in music and particularly in classical guitar repertoire. I remember going to a concert of a Spanish guitarist in my hometown and I was really fascinated! I guess it was probably after that, that I decided to become a classical guitarist.
What repertoire do you enjoy playing the most?
I really enjoy playing “Segovia’s repertoire” like Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Ponce, Tansman, etc. I also like playing baroque music, specially the one written for harpsichord, like Scarlatti and Carlos Seixas.
What guitar or guitars do you perform on? Strings?
For the last two years I play with a cedar double top guitar made by the German luthier Dieter Müller. I use D’Addario strings (EJ45 – normal tension) and play with a customized Guitarlift made by Felix Justen.
Which guitarists/musicians have had the most influence on you?
Difficult question!! I think I absorbed lots of little things from probably all the guitarists I had the luck to work with or to listen to. But I am sure that the ones that influenced me the most were the ones that I was lucky to have as teachers: Margarita Escarpa, who was my teacher for four years, during my bachelor and who taught me most of the things I know today, and Thomas Müller-Pering, with who I am currently studying my master degree in Weimar, and is helping me so much in finding myself as a musician!
Outside the classical guitar world my biggest influences are Maria João Pires and Alicia de Larrocha.
If you have recordings, which recording/s are you most proud of? If not, are you planning to record a CD?
I don’t have any CDs yet, but I am really proud of the video recorded with Open Strings Berlin, where I recorded Sonata 23 by Carlos Seixas.
I would love to record a Cd soon and is something that I have in mind, but unfortunately, right now, I can’t afford the expenses of a cd recording.
Are there any recordings that you consider have the finest recorded sound for guitar?
What are some up and coming projects (recordings, concerts) you are excited about?
Right now I don’t have so many projects planned… I am going to Tallinn next week for the Tallinn Guitar Festival, since I received the Eurostrings Scholarship to go to this festival and I am really excited about it! I will also play in Barcelona in September. I am also thinking in publishing more transcriptions of Carlos Seixas’ music, but nothing planned yet!
Technique and Performance
How much do you practice? And, do you structure your practice in any particular way?
It is something that changes so much depending on the repertoire and the projects I have, but I try always to practice six hours per day. Although I believe the most important thing is not the amount of hours one studies but how concentrated, efficient and productive one can be during the practice session. I already know myself and know that I need a bit of time to reach the level I want, at least now. I also believe that the most important thing is to have lots of discipline in order to be strict and have a frequent amount of practice every day.
I always try to adjust my practice depending on what do I have to do and how much time I have. If I need to read new repertoire it will be a completely different study of if I have a concert or a competition. When I have a public performance I spend more time working on memory issues, cleaning difficult passages and I always try to play a lot for my friends, teachers or my colleagues. Chamber music is always part of my practice session also. Besides that, no particular structure on my practicing time!
Are there aspects of guitar that you struggle with or that you find you are still working on?
Ufff, so many!!!! The guitar is such a difficult instrument and I think that one is never completely happy with the result and there is always something, probably not “to struggle with”, but that you can improve. Also, my struggling aspects change depending on the repertoire I am working on. Right now I work mostly on the consistency of the sound, dynamics and colors, articulation and timing.
Do you deliberately memorize music or have a technique that helps assimilate music into memory?
I don’t memorize scores extremely easily, and actually that is one of the most important aspects on my practicing session, once I already worked a little bit on the piece. Of course I can memorize a piece after playing it and studying it for a couple of day, but I feel the need of being 100% sure that everything is well memorized. I do mental practice, I play with external distractions (loud music, reading a book, being completely out of tune, etc.), I play with a mute and I always like to have little “safe” spots in the piece, just in case something bad happens during a performance! That way I don’t feel completely lost and can continue from the last “safe spot” on.
I published last month two transcriptions from the Portuguese baroque composer Carlos Seixas. The two sonatas (23 and 24) were published by Les Productions d’Oz and I am thinking in publishing some more transcriptions in the future.
Do you have a favorite drill you use to warm up?
Not really… I normally warm up with some easy technical exercises or, when I have too many things going on and not so much time, I just start my practice session with the technical difficult part I have in the pieces that I am studying, and just study them in a really slow tempo.
Do you have any pre-concert rituals?
I don’t think it is a ritual but I like it to have a relaxed day, when it is possible. Sleep enough, drink lots of water, eat well and playing only some excerpts from my repertoire. Before the concert I really like to have time to try the room and to warm up properly.
Do you do anything to your nails or shape them in a particular way?
Yes, I do! I don’t have super strong nails so I always need to be very careful with them. I used to take a couple of vitamin supplies for some year, yet I don’t need it anymore. But I always try to have them well hydrated and filled. When I have some important thing going on, in order to be comfortable in the day of the concert or a competition day I normally practice the days before with tape to protect my nails. It doesn’t sound great, but it is the best solution to keep them with the right length.
Advice to Younger Players
What single most important piece of advice about practicing would you offer to younger players?
To be always aware of everything you do while practicing! One should be always 100% concentrated and demanding while practicing. I also think that is really important to be familiar with the classical guitar world: doing masterclasses, getting in touch with some teachers and players, doing competitions, going to concerts, learning about repertoire, etc.
What repertoire do you consider essential for young/conservatory students to assimilate? Why? Recordings that every young guitarist should be familiar with and why?
I think the best thing is to read and play lots of different pieces, so you would get familiar with different styles and interpretation/technical approaches. I find studies really useful for young players, since they normally solve some technical problem and are not so difficult to read, so it improves sight-reading a lot. The repertoire from the Classic period is always a good choice since it has a little bit of everything: simple harmony, melodic lines, arpeggios, etc. I also find interesting Fernando Sor’s Studies, Villa-Lobos’ Studies, Bach’s Lute Suites, Tárrega’s Preludes, Estudios Sencillos from Leo Brouwer, for example.
Talking about recordings I think every student must hear the historic recordings from Segovia, Bream and Williams, but also the recording from the great masters of our time: Carlo Marchionne, Ricardo Gallén, Zoran Dukic, David Russell, Thomas Müller-Pering, etc.
It is also extremely important to hear recordings of orchestras, piano, violin, string quartets, operas, etc. I believe this is the best way to develop a refined music taste and to improve one’s interpretation skills.
Tangent
What is the last book that you read? Favorite author/s?
The last book I read was “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” by José Saramago. My favorite authors are Gabriel García Marquez and José Saramago, of course!
Do you meditate in any way?
Not at all… But I should!! 😀
What is your favorite way to spend time when not practicing?
I like to go out with my friend and family, especially when I am in my hometown. When I am not, I like to read, listen to music, go to concerts, and watch Netflix series!
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