Acoustic Guitar Styles

Larry Sandberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136804656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

"Acoustic Guitar Styles" introduces the most popular traditional styles for the acoustic guitar. The step-by-step approach, using a small repertoire of well-known songs, enables the student to explore various styles that can be adapted to play personal favorites. Although a basic knowledge of the guitar is assumed, even the beginner will benefit from this progressive approach.

PART

I

Preliminaries

1

How to Use This Book

Basics

The first part of this book is designed to establish a basic set of chord-changing skills that you absolutely must have in order to make the most out of the later section. It’s not hard, but you must be comfortable with these basic chord shapes and changes before proceeding. This book is about rhythm. It’s about learning a variety of beats and rhythmic feelings in your picking hand. And if you can’t make your chord changes on time, you’re not going to be able to keep a steady beat.

Notes and Tablature

Tablature is a dangerous friend: two-faced, fickle, and flattering. There’s something about tablature that’s like painting by numbers. It discourages thinking.

Reading notes is a little better because it seems to engage the mind in a more exciting way. But it can also be dangerous because it still puts you in the mind-set of doing what you’re told, rather than figuring things out for yourself.

Learning by ear is good because it trains the ear and encourages experiment. The only way to see whether something works is to put your finger down somewhere and see if it’s the right note. If it’s not, try again. The great virtue of this approach is that it teaches you that when you play a wrong note through experimentation, it’s part of a process rather than a mistake. This is the single most important lesson you have to learn in order to be a creative musician.

Learning by ear and by experiment are also more demanding than learning by rote. Being your own person is always harder than following orders. Living in a protected environment completely shielded from problems doesn’t teach you how to solve them. You wouldn’t raise your child this way, so why would I want to teach you to play this way? Instead, I set you up with problems that you’re likely to succeed at to help you succeed in other instances. Sometimes you’ve got training wheels. Sometimes you’re on your own. The problem-solving and experimental “creative-work” tasks are easy at first, getting harder as you progress through the book.

This book combines all of the approaches I’ve outlined. It uses notes and tablature because it has to; books are a written medium. It uses a CD to encourage ear training and provide aural examples. And it assigns creative exercises to make you think things out on your own and experiment. Be fearless. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. You will play wrong notes. You should play wrong notes. How else are you going to learn where the right ones are?

Setting Your Pace

The second part of this book consists of sections devoted to particular styles. Each section develops a series of techniques progressively and cumulatively. In almost every case, it’s important to master a given technique at least to a level of basic comfort and assured rhythmic flow before you proceed to the next. From time to time, I give you some advice, based on experience with lots of students. Be sure to stop here and work on this, I say. Or, it’s okay to go on, I say, to the next section while you’re still working on this technique. But as much as I try to give the feeling that I’m there working with you, I’m just not. You have to be your own judge of how fast to take things. Be conservative. You can’t be too conservative.

Some of the “creative work” I throw out at you is just there to hone your skills. Other assignments require a lot of thought and trial and error, possibly involving weeks of experiment as a cumulative, ongoing process. It’s okay to keep working on these while you move on to a following section. You’ll have to figure out your own learning style. Just remember that progress does not get made overnight in music. It comes from doing the same thing over and over and over until you get it right. That might be a dozen times for one person or a thousand for another—whatever it takes.

Finding Your Place and Using the CD

Although this book is divided into chapters, the real units of thought are sections called tracks. Each track section in the book refers to a corresponding track number on the accompanying CD.

The CD has many short tracks, adding up to as much music as a CD can hold. I suggest you set your CD player to its repeat track setting when you study a track, so that you can play the same track over and over again. This is what real musicians do when they study a piece of music. Like learning to move your fingers, learning by ear requires more repetition than beginners or nonmusicians believe.

Listening

The best way to learn the music in this book is with the active support and surrounding of a living musical culture. Second best is to immerse yourself in CD listening. Broad listening is good, but, for purposes of learning, a small collection for intense and repeated listening is even better.

This book makes frequent listening suggestions. There’s nothing esoteric about most of the names listed. They’re all well known traditional artists, most of whom have served as models for contemporary guitarists for many years. Check out the online or in-store retail CD databases, and you’ll see many recordings by most of these artists. You can even listen online to streaming audio of many selections. And good big-city or academic libraries, or small libraries with interlibrary loan service, are liable to have recordings of their work. Bear in mind that classic recordings of traditional music often go in and out of print, reappearing at times with album different titles on different labels. Therefore, search by song title and artist in the CD databases.

Also look for different artists’ versions of the same song. Listening to different versions teaches you about the way personal styles develop and about the degree of latitude you have in making up your own arrangements.

One of the big differences between successful guitarists and wannabes (to use a brutal but perfectly truthful term) is in the quality and intensity of listening study. Listening ranks in importance along with practice itself.

Tuning

Track 1 on the CD sounds out the high and low E strings as a tuning reference.

2

Basic Chord Shapes

The ch...