Too many guitar recordings are polished in studios for months and are nearly perfect in many ways – put together from hundreds of takes, resulting no mistakes, superb sound and so on. But sometimes I feel that the more you polish the greater is the chance to wash out some essential things in music – the human feelings and the soul of the music itself.
Music on this disc is not the one that would fit to a concert hall. That’s my opinion and with this CD I’d like to thank the people who keep organizing live-music events and jam sessions. Keep going!
Unfortunately the guitar is not the instrument of an orchestra. That’s why the guitarists who are not playing in some band need seriously to think what they are going to do after graduating from music area. In different countries the situation is different but you don’t need to invent anything new, you can always take a look at what the others do.
Generally the guitar players can not get away from teaching guitar. It is quite hard to manage only by playing the guitar. That is why most of the players are linked to schools, learning stuff and master classes. Besides the demand for the teachers is almost always availible. For example UK Music Jobs offer about 5-6 jobs to the guitar teachers every day. It is not bad at all. Of course in condition if you live in UK.
One way to sell your music is record- selling. But as we know it can be quite hard to make money by selling classical recors. All that long process starting with choosing songs and ending with recording and producing can be very complicated and it takes a lot of time. The hardest part of that process starts when the record box is already behind your door – it is SELLING.
Starting of selling is not easy in the beginning because nobody just knows your music. Hope that somebody just notices your record in the music store and buys it, is not the best solution. Think about that how many records are in the music store, and how many people come to the shop to buy some classical record per day. And how many people would buy an unknown record? What to do then?
I’ll write about that more and if you are interested, next time i’ll talk about record selling in USA – how to sell them there and make it so that people are going to buy them as well.
Share your experience in your life as being a guitarist, how things are going for you so far?
Let’s go on with the guitar playing technique and I was previously talking about an important part of the techique – the playing mechanics. So what is a good material for developing your mechanics?
The term “playing mechanics” came prominently to my mind unfortunately when I already had done my BA degree in classical guitar but luckily before starting the MA so I took a year off to develop my technique and mechanics before moving on. The initial material that catched my attention was the Ricardo Iznaola’s “Kitharologus“. In first place it was not the actual exercises that attracted me but the exact workout plans that he suggests. Indeed – playing the guitar on the professional level can be demanding and no sportsman wouldn’t ever expect good results without daily practicing routines. 2-3 a day. Of course, it takes time! But if you don’t deal with it conciously the time will fly away anyway and then there is no wonder that you have fears about going live or recording something.
So strict plans and rules for yourself is the key. People are lazy. Me too. For a start I followed the Iznaola’s suggested daily practicing routines and after about 5 years started to do things my way. I would take a piece of actual music and turn the smaller parts of it to an exersice in the same fashion. More and more I found that I even don’t have to think about my playing techniques any more and I can concentrate on the music. Don’t believe the guys who tell you that the guitar is the most challenging instrument in the world as there are so many different movements involved. The fact is that every instrument has developed its repertoire to the utmost limit of the instruments playing technique. Playing the “Flight of the bumble bee” on the piano is a job for an average student but for the tuba player it is only a dream. Of course, I would now question the idea of playing such things on tuba anyway (as for me it is still unclear why people struggle with Bach on guitar when the harpsichord does the job many times better) but this is another topic.
The other book that I found useful in some ways, was the Scott Tennants “Pumping Nylon” but it is more a handbook than a method book. I mean – you cannot learn a language from a dictionary although we all agree that the information presented in a dictionary is correct and often very useful.
But lately I discover a less known author. That is Bryan Townsend and his “The Guitarist’s Complete Technique Kit” gathers together many important principles that I have been using in my work both as a player and a teacher. Although many of the ideas don’t seem to be authentic but hey – you need a good tool, and here it is, so do your job and don’t waste time with thinking “who’s made the hammer that I find so useful ”
One good opportunity to develop the skills of playing the guitar is learning the guitar from textbook. However there are many textbooks (in Estonian a dozen, but hundreds in English and Russian), and a lot of them are available our stores already. How to choose the right textbook and how many should one person have?
Textbooks can be devided into three categories: 1) textbooks for beginners, 2) textbooks devoted to a particular style, 3) technical textbooks. By choosing a suitable textbook you should think about which category of books do you need. The most complicated is the beginning and it is very important to find a textbook for beginners, which you would thoroughly understand and which seems appropriate for a progressive pace. Beginner‘s books may also be divided into a style, and although the theory is the same for the beginning of each style, however, the emphasis is different and has different music examples. Further the textbooks have divided into books for children and books for adults, and sometimes the author has not thought about it properly.
Everything is easier if you already have acquired the basics, because in this case a textbook does not have to provide everything for you, you should be able to think and analyze and exclude unnecessary. Then it makes sense to use a particular style of textbooks devoted to the rock, jazz, classical, flamenco, fingerstyle, blues, country, funk, metal etc. Each style has its jargon and its use in addition to various guitars and a very different „vocabulary“.
The books for technique development may also be universal or dedicated to a particular style. As for more specific style the book is as more oriented are exercises, so it may be easier to understand.
The topic of guitar textbooks is long and complicated, and I will continue it soon! In the meantime, look presentable Estonia‘s choice of guitar textbooks here.
A German study looked at professional violinists and found out that before the age of 21, they had all practised an instrument for 10 000 hours. Given that the violin playing started at the age of 6 mostly, it makes an average of 666 hours a year. In round figures we can say that these people are practising an instrument on average 2 hours a day for 15 years. Given that children have occasionally also other things to do (for example, they go to school after all!), lessons and exercises will also be missed, then clearly they will have much more hours in those days.
An acquisition of classical guitar playing technique is also concidered to take for 16 years and many of the curriculums are structured so. In principle the High School and University make 16 years. From here practising continues as not to lose technique. Only the technique is not what is needed, but musical development as well.
But when you play the musical instrument only for your pleasure, and do not necessarily want to make money with that on stages, you acquire basic skills quite quickly. This is what makes the guitar for a unique instrument as it is also a very simple way to make great music.
Last Friday we celebrated the 3rd birthday of the Guitar School project - 5000 students, 5 books+CD-s, some audio CD-s, more than 500 people who graduated from our live courses, numerous free e-courses. It’s been busy time and worth celebrating.The party was in Art Cafe, Tallinn and there was a total 4 hour live show with all different types of guitarists:
As promised before – let’s dig a little deeper into the subject of practicing and this time I’ll express my thoughts about developing guitarists’ playing technique as this is a very important factor in successful guitar playing.
Sometimes people say that one or another guitarist (or other instrumentalist or a singer or an athlet) has a good technique. How to get it and why do we need that at all? A simple formula would tell you that technique = talent+hard work. Some people seem to learn many activities without even noticing it – takes the rollerblades on off he goes! Takes skis and again – elegant from the first moment. Takes up the guitar and from the first moment the playing position is as taken from a good method book. The rest of us just need to compensate the talent with hard work. But the physical talent depends greatly on the previous experience so sometimes it isn’t really talent but it is work, too. But this work has been done from early age on and sometimes without noticing. From a certain level the hard work is the only thing that gets you further. So called talent is a pleasant thing to start with but it takes more than that. It may be different in other fields of music but the classical playing techniques explore the utmost abilities of human body and mind.
Studying the classical guitar techniques takes about 16 years if done regularly. It is a normal and average estimation as most of players start at the age of 6-7 and go through all the schools with about 16 years. Nevertheless, there have been interesting experiments through times and I remember it was Štěpán Rak who put some Finnish students on a right track with just a couple of years. There were people who said that those students were lacking the musical expression. Truth is that we can compare playing and instrument with doing some sports but in music there is more than just a good technique. Techique must be applied to a musical material to make any sense at all. That’s why it may take time for understanding more complex music forms than just a song. (Ironically, I have now moved from sonatas to songs:)
One can compare it to learning to speak – if you know and can articulate a bunch of words in any language it doesn’t automatically mean that your speech makes sense. But apart from music a specific field of action can be practiced separately – the playing mechanics. So what the hack is this?! Mechanics are the actual finger movements and a playing technique is made up of different mechanical elements. For example – if you are good at playing scales then I would say that you have a good scale-technique but you need many different mechanical skills to execute a scale on the guitar: producing the sound, position of left hand, position of right hand, moving from string to string in both hands, shifting positions, cooperation of hands, ability to articulate everything rhytmically, ability to press down the strings correctly with your left hand, knowledge about where to press and so on.. So it may very well be that a player can do all the mechanical aspects but can’t put them effectively together and the result is weak technique. Can be the other way, too. There are players who do everything “wrong” but still don’t make a mistake and can rely on their technique. But this is an exeption as there alwasy are some.
The older guitar method books doesn’t address playing mechanics but think that if you practice a scale then you will automatically practice everything in it (the mechanical elements). It is true only when you already know how to execute those different mechanical movements. If not, then the most effective way to improve your technique is to deal separately with your playing mechanics.
The fact is that a human being cannot concentrate on more than 2-3 things at the time and the other aspects of mechanics must act automatically. If you now add to the 9-10 mechanical elements the other important things – the music, expression, performance, memory, action on the scene etc. then you will find that there is no way that you can control all of those aspects conciously. So the work with mechanics and more generally, playing techniques, must be done previously and act automatically.
In my next post I will share you some of the study material that I have used to improve my technique.
There are always pros and contras regarding the music competitions but this year we’ll give a chance to the guitar students from Scandinavia, Baltics and Eastern Europe. Spread the word!
Julia, the chief of the contest:
“We are happy to announce that Estonian Guitar Society is organizing the International Youth Guitar Competition “Tallinn 2010” from July 12th to 16th 2010. We would be happy to invite guitar students, especially those of younger age, to participate in the competition. All the information is available on our website www.tallinnguitar.com.
Best wishes and see you in Tallinn this summer!”
Julia Kahro-Reinman
Estonian Guitar Society
info@tallinnguitar.com
+372-5622-8943
Even nowadays one can see people coming to guitar lessons with the old soviet guitars that were made in a furniture factory. Some of the instruments even stay in tune for a while and let’s be honest – there was a time when this model was the only choice for a beginner. I also started my studies with that one. Nevertheless I was waiting for the time when those guitars are history.
But recently all sorts of new bad guitars labels begun to show up – Williams, Stagg, MSA… there are many other funny names. And seems that they can be worse than those Soviet things. Regardless the name they all come from China and the initial 4 EUR turns up to be more than 100 EUR in shops here.
But that’s nothing compared to the guitar on the picture above! This guitar is made of aluminium and was a side product in some factory. Many factories had side products to fully use the material but that’s crazy! It was produced somewhere in Ukraine and if you wish to learn more about the worst guitars in the world, please visit www.cheesyguitars.com
Too many guitar recordings are polished in studios for months and are nearly perfect in many ways – put together from hundreds of takes, resulting no mistakes, superb sound and so on. But sometimes I feel that the more you polish the greater is the chance to wash out some essential things in music – the human feelings and the soul of the music itself.
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