Classical Guitar For Dummies

Jon Chappell, Mark Phillips

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119873150
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música de guitarra

Discover the magic of classical guitar with this fun and easy guide

The perfect starting point to learning classical guitar, Classical Guitar For Dummies, walks you through the steps, techniques, and styles you'll need to finger-pick your way around some of the most beautiful songs ever written.

Whether you're a first timer looking to add your very first classical guitar to your collection or you've already made the jump to the classical style want to pick up some priceless tips, this book is the easy-to-read companion you'll want at your side. You can even play along with audio and video examples at dummies.com that will help you on your journey toward classical guitar mastery.

In Classical Guitar For Dummies, you'll find:

• Foundational and advanced techniques, from adapting your playing posture to coloring your tone with vibrato
• Tips and tricks on playing classical guitar favorites, like Cavatina by Stanley Myers
• Explorations of classical scales, up and down the guitar neck

Classical Guitar For Dummies is an essential aid for new and aspiring classical guitarists just beginning to learn their craft. More experienced guitarists seeking to improve their fundamentals and learn some new strategies for creating amazing music will also find a ton of useful info inside.

Part 1

Getting to Know the Classical Guitar

IN THIS PART …

Identify the different parts of the guitar.

Get into the proper playing position.

Place your hands correctly on the guitar.

Tune the guitar.

Understand music notation and tablature.

Chapter 1

An Acoustic Guitar in a League of Its Own

IN THIS CHAPTER

Examining the term “classical guitar”

Breaking down the classical guitar’s parts

Noting the physical and stylistic differences between classical guitar and other guitar types

In the right hands, the classical guitar can produce some of the most beautiful sounds in all of music. With it, a skilled performer can create miniature moments of intimate tenderness or stirring sagas of grandeur and passion. One reason the classical guitar is capable of such wide-ranging textures and emotions is that it’s one of the few stringed instruments that can play chords and single notes with equal ease. And many people credit its special emotive powers to the fact that the performer uses both hands to touch the strings directly to make a sound, allowing them to coax out the softest melody or to vigorously ring out triumphant, full-voiced chords. The tonal variations you can achieve on a guitar played in the classical way rival the colors of the entire symphony orchestra. Even the great Beethoven agreed, calling the guitar “a miniature orchestra in itself.”

In this chapter, we start off with the very basics, explaining the two different connotations associated with “classical guitar” to give you a solid understanding of what you’re reading about in the first place. (Many people may not realize that simply playing a classical piece on a guitar doesn’t necessarily qualify as “classical guitar”!) We then conduct a side-by-side comparison of the classical guitar and its traditional acoustic counterpart, exploring their differences in physique as well as technique and musical requirements. Finally, we expound on the allure of this lesser-known stringed instrument to whet your appetite for what’s in store.

Defining What a Classical Guitar Is (and Isn’t)

The first thing you have to sort out is just what’s meant by the term “classical guitar.” It can describe both a type of instrument and a style of music played on that instrument. When referring to the instrument itself, you’re talking about a guitar that has a particular design and construction, is made of certain materials, and requires playing techniques that are unique to this type of guitar, as compared to other guitars. To mine the depths of all the tonal and textural richness that await you in the world of the classical guitar music, you must employ those specific right- and left-hand techniques, which together comprise the classical guitar style.

In this book we focus exclusively on the techniques that get you playing the classical guitar style — using a nylon-string classical guitar and stroking the strings with your right-hand fingers. Doing this empowers you to play the music written by the great classical composers throughout history, and following in the footsteps of concert-level virtuosos have for centuries brought their performance techniques to a high art in the same way Vladimir Horowitz did with the piano and Itzhak Perlman did with the violin. The guitar has its own Perlmans and Horowitzes, and you can read about them in Chapter 17.

The guitar as we know it is a relatively young instrument, having evolved to its present form in the 19th century. As such, it doesn’t have the rich body of music available for it that, say, the violin does, which has been around for more than 500 years. But the classical guitar has been, how shall we say, industrious in the way it has “borrowed” music from other instruments to claim as its own. As a result, studying classical guitar means that in addition to playing music written for the guitar, you play a lot of music that wasn’t written for the guitar in the first place, nor written by a composer who would recognize the instrument you hold in your hands. But that’s just part of the adventure of being a guitarist; you have to be somewhat of a pioneer with your instrument.

Nevertheless, nowadays composers write for the instrument all the time, ensuring its continued place in the field of serious musical instrument study. Many guitarists, associations, and organizations commission well-known composers to write compositions for the guitar in the same way that Beethoven and Mozart were commissioned by wealthy benefactors to write symphonies and sonatas.

Some well-known composers from the 20th century who’ve written for the guitar include Heitor Villa-Lobos, Luciano Berio, Benjamin Britten, Elliott Carter, Peter Maxwell Davies, William Walton, Alberto Ginestera, Ástor Piazzolla, and Leo Brouwer. If you think of the classical guitar as playing just the work of the great masters or having an undeniably “Spanish sound,” check out what modern musical thinkers are cooking up for the classical guitar all the time.

After taking a while to come into its own historically, the classical guitar is now a permanent member of the classical music community. Classical guitar is taught in universities and conservatories, it’s a frequent program entry for concert and recital halls, and it’s found readily in new recordings by major classical music record companies. As far as music for the guitar goes, however, it’s definitely in the minority, at least in terms of music that gets heard by the public at large — with rock and pop being the major players in this arena.

Knowing What a Classical Guitar Looks Like

Viewed from the front, or facing the instrument in its standing-up position, the classical guitar body has an upper section, or bulge, where the wood curves outward; a lower section; and an inward curve in the middle separating the upper and lower parts.

The purpose of the guitar’s body is to amplify the sound that the vibrating strings make. So the guitar’s back and sides are made of stiff, hard wood that reflects, or bounces, the sound off its surface and through the top of the guitar and the sound hole. The traditional wood for the back and sides is rosewood, though lower-priced guitars sometimes use mahogany or maple. For the top, a different wood from the back and sides is used because the top’s function is to vibrate freely with the notes that the plucked strings produce. So the wood for the top is softer and more resonant — spruce and cedar are the two most common top woods.

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, so we present a pictu...