Taking Your Camera on the Road

What a delight this cd is. From the spacious opening phrase of Irish Landscapes, to the angry and intensely sad final notes of Just Another Day In May, Peter Finger plays the guitar like no other. His compositions are complex and riveting, weaving through their various themes and sub-themes, breaking at times into runs of blistering speed or layers of chords, but the listener is never lost, and the melodies always return to the familiar. And while Finger plays like the virtuoso he is, the listener never feels that he is witnessing a contest – the compositions are refined and every note adds to the whole. (more…)

My husband, partner, lover, and best friend, Brent, is behind every one of these articles, though he won’t claim any responsibility for the messed up ones. He gives all the blame to me on those and I accept them all. Still, it’s time he had his own space to play on our site. I’ve been nagging him for years and he’s finally got somethings he wants to share.

I introduce to you The 12th Fret by Brent VanFossen.

He will be covering a wide variety of subjects that are near and dear to his heart about the guitar. Oh, and not just anything about the guitar. His early childhood days of whaling on his Les Paul electric guitar have matured into accoustical guitar styles including classical and fingerstyle guitar techniques. Taking guitar lessons for the first time since he was a young boy, he will be posting his notes about the lessons he takes and the things that he learns. He has spent the past few years exploring a wide range of guitar playing styles and techniques and music, and he will share those lessons as well.

So stay tuned for some musical fun and interesting information about guitars, guitar playing, and guitar-making.

Adelita

Owen picked up my music book, and Adelita fell out, landing on the stand ready to be played. That was a fortunate accident. I had forgotten I had it tucked inside. He asked me, “What is this?” and I said that I’d been working on it and had a few questions. I asked him about the grace notes. I said they are written before the bass notes. “They always are, but they come with it,” he said. So I demonstrated measures 11 and 12, and he commented, “That’s a hard spot.” I agreed.

I asked why it was written that way, and he told me that it’s assumed you understand that the grace notes are not counted, they’re not part of the rhythm. They’re crushed into the beat. Those are not really sixteenth notes, they’re just whatever they happen to be.

It also depends on what era you’re talking about. If you’re talking about the Baroque era, a single grace note would be on the beat followed by a second one of equal value. But in the Romantic period, the grace notes become crushed into the beat and are no longer counted. Nowadays, it’s pretty much the way it was in the Romantic period.

I told him I had been listening to some of the better players on this song, and he asked who. So I told him Pepe Romero and Narciso Yepes (I forgot Liona Boyd). “I met Narciso once,” he told me. “Blind as a bat. I showed him a piece of music, and he looked at the page from about two inches away, his face right up to the page. It’s amazing he could even read music. He had a five-fingered technique, and could play with incredible speed. I listened to him play a whole concert, and he played on a ten-string guitar… I loved that ten-string guitar. I always wanted one.” So I told about seeing them in Barcelona, and then about a couple friends I had who each own one. He told me he had never had a chance to play one.

Memorization

He asked me about my memorization exercise. He had asked me to memorize a simple piece from the previous week’s work, and to know it well enough that I could start playing at any measure. This particular piece is very simple, and is only twelve bars long. So I played it once from memory (he put the music in front of me, but I refused to use it), and then he asked me to play the 4th, then the 6th, then the 11th measures, which I did with little hesitation. He was pleased with that. “You get better at this,” he said, “and you stop struggling to learn the piece, and you get it thoroughly learned.”

I explained Adelita to him using all the tricks he had showed me, and I played the parts for him. He was very pleased with that little demonstration, and commented again that this makes the piece so much easier to remember, because you can actually think about it without your guitar.

Tips for Adelita (or any technical piece)

He recommended that in a technical place, like measures 11 and 12, you play very softly, and not expect anything for a while. Don’t force it to sound, because if you do that, you learn the forcing along with the music, so it becomes part of the music. Every time you get there, you strain something, because you’re forcing you hand to do something. It’s better to let it just be half there. He demonstrated measure 12, and said, “Just slow it down, don’t push your hand at all. In a short time, this will become real easy. If you force your hand, it will take longer, and even then, it won’t be as smooth.” He said that a person with a smaller hand would have more trouble with this, and that it might be worthwhile to release the sixth string while playing the grace notes, until it starts to flow a little better.

Other Assigned Pieces

I played Prelude No. 12 for him from Shearer 1 on page 47, and he asked me to make sure and hold the bass note as long as possible while the rest of the arpeggio was being played.

I played Folk Song on p53 with Owen playing the second guitar part.

I also played Carulli’s Country Dance on p55, and he showed me how the last two notes of the third measure should be played i-m, in order to set up the i-m of the treble part of the fourth measure. The last note of the 15th measure should be played with the fourth finger so the third finger can get the low G on the sixth string in the 16th measure. In measure 21 and 22, make sure the thumb plays the bass notes on the beat, while the i and m fingers alternate the other notes. At the end of the piece, play from the beginning, but omit the repeats and end at the 16th measure.

He emphasized that all of these pieces should be played at a plodding tempo to allow my hand to relax as much as possible. Make sure the hand is loose between the notes.

We talked about Carulli’s English Dance on p69, one of my assignments for the coming week. He played it for me, then showed me how the index finger plays the notes on the off-beat in the first eight measures like a whisper. Likewise on measures 9 through 12. For these first 12 measures, the emphasis is on the treble, so we make the thumb very soft. Beginning with the 13th measure, the emphasis is on the thumb. This is not as easy as it looks, but this is the kind of detail that brings the piece out. In measures 13 through 15, the thumb plays on the beat with emphasis, and the treble notes alternate between i and m. There is a beautiful contrast between measures 9 through 12, and measures 13 through 15.

Also, in 2/4 time, you have a strong/weak accent. This piece is written with eighth notes, so the count is “Strong-and-weak-and Strong-and-weak-and…” The weak note is weaker than the strong note, obviously, but the “and” is even softly than the weak note. This provides a pulse to the music. Measures 13 though 15 should be played legato.

Scale Work

He talked about scales. We played the two-octave scales beginning on the A of the fifth fret. Pay attention to strict alternation of the right i and m fingers. Then play it m-i. Then play i-a. It’s confusing at first, but it gets to be very comfortable, because those two fingers are the same length.

Play the chromatic exercise at fret 5 with fingers 1,2,3,4. Then play 1,2,4,3. The trick here is to place the fourth and third fingers together, then remove the fourth to play the third. Once that is comfortable, play this with different fingers of the right hand.

The next week, play 1,3,2,4. In this case, play 1, then place 3 and 2 together and play 3. Then, remove 3 and play 2. Then place 3 and 4 together and play 4. You put them down in pairs. This ingrains the principle of preparing the fingers and keeping them close to the strings. Also, you play a note and transfer the pressure to the next one. See my first lesson report for a discussion of this.

Scales are much more useful if you focus instead of just cranking them out. Many players play lots of scales with no focus, and it’s questionable whether it really helps them, and may even hurt them. When you play scales, spend time working where the confusion is. If it takes no effort to do them, “then no wood is burning up here,” he said tapping his forehead with a finger. “Move on to the next one.”

Hand Position – The Segovia Hand vs The California Hand

He commented again on hand position. There is no single right way to hold the right hand. You have to be flexible and vary the position for different sounds. The West Coast players play with a straighter wrist, and the sound is rounder and fatter, but it doesn’t have the projection of the Segovia hand. The Segovia hand isn’t quite as sweet, but it will carry to the back of the auditorium, while the angled hand is softer and doesn’t carry as well. The Segovia hand has a more focused tone, and it has more overtones in it. You need these two styles for different kinds of sounds. Everything is right as long as you have no dysfunctional tension. If it sounds great, it doesn’t matter what your hand looks like, as long as you’re not hurting yourself. If you are playing with too much tension, you’re destined for a short career.

I commented that I found the Segovia sound harsher and less pleasing when I played. He showed me how my first finger was too vertical. Instead, it needs to lean with the knuckle just a bit toward the headstock, so the nail and flesh play together. If this isn’t possible, the nail is too long. See Figure 7 on page 13 of Shearer Classic Guitar Technique Volume 1. If you don’t have the book, the “a” finger is vertical, and “m” and “i” have progressively more tilt to them. This gives the Segovia hand a much nicer sound.

I’ve been assigned to work on Adelita playing as softly as possible. Whisper. As soft as I can make it. This will cause the left hand to also play lighter, and reduce the tension there. Later, after this has become a reflex, we can bring up the volume without bringing up the tension.

My lesson began this week when I told Owen that I had spent the week playing *slowly*. And he said, “Whenever you’re making mistakes, you can count on one thing: You’re going too fast. That’s the reason. And it’s a bad idea to practice mistakes, because that’s what comes out when you perform. It’s not known a priori that by playing slowly, you get to play faster. It’s not obvious.”

He opened my book and asked me to play one of the pieces from this week’s assignment. I remember my right thumb having much trouble finding its way to the right strings. On listening back to the recording, I don’t hear as many mistakes as I remember, but it wasn’t my best performance, and while he said nothing about that, I need to drill the right thumb moving to particular strings. I believe I can extract the bass line from my assigned work and make a good exercise for that.

Hand Positions

Owen asked me to make a fist with my right hand, and then release all the tension. He asked me, “You see where your hand went to? That’s probably a little better place to start. You can move your arm up a little bit, too. We have to be able to play with our hands in all different shapes to get different sound qualities, to be inventive, and to be interesting in our inflection. Like when an actor is giving his lines on stage, he has lots of inflections in his voice. He can direct your attention to this or that, and it helps you to have a complete understanding of what he’s saying. In guitar, we use the right hand to do that, to make inflections and to make interesting phrasing. But that hand position you’ve got right there (the Segovia hand) is probably closer to how you want to play. You can play the other way too (what he calls the California hand, with a straighter wrist) but what I’m trying to do is to get you to the point where you play with no tensions at all. To play with the straighter wrist requires a little tension to hold the hand up.”

He told me that my hand looked much better this week than it had before, and that was good, as I’d put in about a dozen hours of concentrated focus with a mirror to make sure there were no right hand tensions. He did say that I wasn’t completely there yet, which was no surprise. He asked me to play the same piece again with the new hand position, and he seemed pleased with what I did.

I played two more pieces for him, and had the same troubles with the right thumb. He came around behind me and corrected my left hand position too, to make sure there was more space between the palm and the neck, to force the fingers up “onto their toes. It’s like dancing.” My thumb was too high, and we laughed that I hadn’t been watching the left hand this week. As I play, he often sings the dominant part (This may be in my future too. Great.)

We talked about phrasing of the Moorish Dance from p 42 of Shearer 1. The question is the bass melody, followed by the harmony making up the answer. Each phrase is two measures long. After the first four phrases, it starts over and the next four phrases are just repeats of the first four. Then, the next phrase has a new question part, but the answer is from the 2nd phrase. Then we play the fourth phrase, except the ending goes up, whereas the first time it went down. Then, that phrase repeats, and the ending is just a repeat of the answer of the last phrase. Altogether, there are only five phrases, or ten measures, out of a 24-bar piece.

Make Memorization Part of Daily Practice

He assigned me to make memorization a part of every day’s practice routine. He said soon, you’ll be able to take in large quantities of music in a sitting. You can get much quicker to playing, because you understand it intellectually. He asked me to take one of these pieces I had been playing and memorize it. He suggested the Prelude No. 7 on p 29. It’s in ABA form, or “simple song” form. Much like most music from the radio, with verse, bridge, and verse. This piece is a miniature, as the A part is only two phrases long. Only three phrases to be able to play all the way through. You just have to learn to put it all together. Five measures to learn instead of 12. Here, the first, third, and 11th measures are the same. The fifth measure is the beginning of the third phrase. And so on.

We need to be able to play something like that, and to be able to start anywhere. Not instantaneously, but if you can think it up to any point, that would mean that you know the notes. The other kind of memory is called reflex memory, or finger memory, and you get it for free just from playing the piece over and over again. But it’s not reliable at all, and you don’t learn music that way. It’s a nervous process, and anything that interferes in the slightest way with that nervous process, like getting nervous, and all the muscle memory can go right out the window. You could be sitting on the stage saying “What am I doing here? I don’t remember anything.” because you can’t get started with your chain of reflexes.

It’s not important to be able to start with *any note* or even *any measure*. You need to be able to start with any phrase, since music is constructed from phrases. He compared music to a conversation. You could start a sentence in the middle, but what good is that? If you get stuck performing a piece, you would just move forward to the beginning of the next phrase. This happens to everyone. As long as you don’t make a face, most people will not notice the difference.

You can learn a piece this way by beginning with the last phrase, and playing to the end. Then the next to last phrase, and playing to the end. Eventually you would learn to start with any phrase as necessary. This learning by phrases is different from the mindless approach I’ve heard before of simply beginning at the last measure and moving toward the first of the piece. I think this is more powerful and useful.

If you know the piece by phrases, you also know the notes. If you know your pieces this way, you could sit down and write them out. He told me of a piano teacher friend of his who would ask his students to memorize their pieces, and then to play the keys with a pencil. That takes *all* the muscle memory out of the equation. That would be very hard, and I don’t know quite how to translate that to guitar. Even the air guitar technique activates the muscle memory to some extent. This skill, once practiced, makes learning pieces very easy.

We talked about Prelude No. 10 on page 41 that is played in 6ths. The first note is played, followed by a pair of notes up a 6th. This continues through the piece until later, the first note descends while the upper second and third notes hang on the previous tone until the repeat of the first note, and then they drop into the 6th. This is a “suspension figure”. The one note is suspended until it resolves on the following beat. You have to think about this in a different way.

We’re learning the nomenclature of what to call things. If you can verbalize something, you can think about it. You can describe it to yourself and think about it when you’re away from your guitar.

He assigned some new work. Prelude No. 12 on p 47 is an exercise in learning which right hand fingers to use to play the piece. The general rule is if two notes are played on adjacent strings, they should be played with i and m. If they are separated by a string, play them with i and a.

I drove to my lesson last night by a different route, and saved more than 20 minutes getting there, so I had a good bit of time to get tuned up and warmed up before my lesson began. Before I knew it, though, Owen had come out, and as I began to put the guitar back in its case, he said, “I’ll carry the guitar, and you can get the case.” And he played a few beautiful chords and gave me the same look John Doan had given me, and I swear, he said the same words John had said: “Every note is so balanced, every note just sings.” And the look on his face was just a simple amazement at the beauty of that instrument.

Once in his studio, he played a bit more, just a few minutes, and then told me that he didn’t want to give it back to me, and that perhaps it would be best for me if he took it home for a month or two to evaluate its qualities. Shortly, though, I had her back in my arms and so the lesson began.

Playing Free Strokes with the Thumb

He looked through my book and saw and commented on all the marks I had made there (per his instructions). He then asked me to play the first prelude, and as I began, I only got about three notes before he told me to slow it down. I played slower, and when I was done, he asked me if I always played rest strokes with my thumb. To be honest, I’d never thought about it, but I told him that I usually don’t play rest strokes, but that the music was so slow and leisurely, that my thumb just did that naturally. He asked me to play using free strokes. He told me that most of his students who learned to play with a pick played thumb rest strokes, and that habit is one that needs to be broken.

He demonstrated playing the piece with a much softer attack of the right thumb. The thumb is stronger than the other fingers, and if we don’t pay attention, it will play too loudly. I’m to lower the force and volume of my bass parts by controlling how hard I strike the strings with the thumb, and to make sure I play free stroke.

The free stroke and the rest stroke have different sounds, for different effects, and should be used as appropriate. The main stroke should always be the free stroke, and the rest stroke added to emphasize a note or line, or to play more staccato.

My nails are a bit too long, and while he didn’t tell me to trim them, he showed me how the nail is striking the string after the flesh does, instead of together, and that gives the notes a harsh sound. I had filed them shorter just yesterday, but I need to make them shorter still.

Relax the Hand after Every Note

As I began the next piece, he played the second part of the duet, and it sounded quite nice, but he busted me again, and emphasized that I needed to slow things down even more, to release the right hand tension after every note, and to exaggerate the releasing of that tension by relaxing the entire right hand between notes so that I could see the relaxation. And he demonstrated the speed he wanted me to play. This wasn’t “no tempo” speed, and he played very much in tempo, but it was probably 30 to 40 beats per minute. He told me that it was boring to play that slowly, but that there was no substitute for it, and reminded me that we are training reflexes so that the relaxation we’re working so hard to develop now will become automatic with time.

I’m to go back and play all of the pieces from this last week at slower speeds, with exaggerated relaxed right hand, and then he asked me to drop some of the reading exercises I had been doing, and added some new arpeggiated pieces from the next few pages of the book. I don’t feel like he’s pushing me through the book, but rather that he’s giving me enough variety that I don’t feel bored with the material, and yet the material is easy enough that I can concentrate on the right hand.

To my credit, he didn’t criticize my left hand as he had last week, and the best part of my no tension practice had been focusing on the left hand. Maybe that’s because I did that right, or maybe because the bigger problem was the right hand last night and there just wasn’t time.

Question and Answer

We then took a look at one of the duets I had studied, and he showed me how the first two bars formed the “question”, while the next two bars formed the “answer”, and together, they make a “phrase”. The answer is a “sequence” of the question, a series of notes with the same shape as the question, but shifted up or down a note or two. So the question is a six-note pattern beginning on the E of the open first string. The answer is the same pattern beginning on the C of the second string. The second phrase begins with a question identical to the first question, and the second answer is almost the same as the first answer, but with a slight variation. A third similar phrase follows. Then, the fourth phrase begins with a question that is the same rhythm as the first three questions, but inverted, and this is called an inversion. The answer to that is a sequence of the question (or an inversion of the first answer). Each phrase in this piece comprises a question and an answer, and the answer is a sequence of the question, except for the ending of the piece. And so the pattern continued. This, he pointed out, makes memorizing the piece much simpler, because this entire 24-bar piece only has six bars of unique music: a two-bar question, a two-bar inversion, and a two bar unique ending. Everything else is just a sequence of one kind or another of the already learned parts. All you have to do to learn the piece is to learn the unique parts, and then learn the overall structure of the song. To prove his point, he closed the book and called out the first note of each succeeding sequence, and I played the piece. This is a dramatic simplification, and obviously will not work so completely on every piece, but as we’re learning a new piece of music, we should think about it intelligently and use our mind to help us make more efficient progress. [Shearer Volume 1: Classic Guitar Technique, p24, “Prelude No. 4”]

In the same way, if we’re having technical difficulties with a piece of music, we should grab the pencil and put a big circle around the phrase that is giving us trouble, and practice just that. Rarely do we need to practice an entire piece. He compared this with learning a speech; if there is one word that we can’t pronounce, or one phrase that hangs up our tongue, we would fix the problem by going right to the problem word or phrase and fixing that, not by reciting from the beginning of the speech. Then, with that fixed, we would go back and give the whole speech perfectly. Otherwise we’ll drive our family and friends crazy with the repetition.

He also gave me a copy of an article he had written that was published in the October issue of Classical Guitar magazine. It’s called “A Few Good Bricks”, and while I haven’t read it yet, one of the ideas is that if you have a pile of bricks in front of the house, there’s no reason to body-build until you can lift 1000 lbs to move the entire pile at once. Instead, you can start now carrying a few bricks at a time, until the whole pile is moved. This makes complete sense, yet as guitarists, we try to rush and learn the whole instrument at once and jump into repertoire that we’re not ready for, and more often than not, people give up in frustration because they don’t make the progress they think they should. And it’s the job of the teacher to help that student know how much he can carry at a time, and when is right to move on.

Learning Music

When we want to learn a complex piece of music, we should take small pieces of it and play them slowly for ten or twenty minutes a day, with intense focus, and eventually we will be playing the parts. He gave the example of one of his students who wanted to learn a fast piece by a well-known rock star. When he arrived at his lesson, he reported that he had practiced it for five hours the day before, but he still couldn’t play the part. Owen told the student that he was sure he had enjoyed his time, but that he had wasted about 4 hours and 50 minutes, and had actually made the job of learning to play it right even harder with each successive day of trying to force the song. If instead, he had spent ten to twenty minutes a day until he had accumulated the five hours in slow, focused practice, he would have been playing that part fluently, and had a lot more time along the way to do or learn something else as well.

The Smartest Finger

We are a three-toed animal, he said holding out his hand, and he showed me that the thumb and index finger were independent, but the other three fingers share tendons and move together. The index finger is the smartest finger, and while we devote a lot of time to making the other fingers independent, they will never be as smart as the index finger (on either hand). If there’s a note we have to hit, we should play it with the index finger, as it’s the smartest. Years ago, there were some pianists who tried to build strength in their fingers by tying strings to them and moving their fingers to lift some weights. And instead of building strength, they stretched their tendons and were unable to play piano successfully for the rest of their lives. Tragic. They completely missed the mark, as they didn’t need more strength but more control. If strength were all we needed, the strongest person would be the best player. While the muscles contribute to that control, it’s the brain that’s really in charge. Our studies should be concentrated on paying attention to what we do, and on making sure we do what we’re trying to do.

What is Classical Music?

From my lesson, we went to the airport to pick up my mother-in-law, who is here to visit for a week. As I sat beside the truck playing Adelita, one of the security guards came up and asked me about the guitar and music. He asked me if I knew any classical music, “like Neil Diamond”. And Lorelle just broke out laughing and went inside to meet Ramona. So I played something else, and when I was done, he told me that his sister had a restaurant, and that if I ever wanted to play I would be welcome, and that they couldn’t pay much, but to tell them that Terrence sent me. So I know that while the area was noisy and he couldn’t hear me very well, and he certainly didn’t know much about music, I made him happy for ten minutes or so, and that was worthwhile. I asked if “Nancy’s” was a place where lots of musicians gathered, and he said, “No, just you.” Oh, well.