Classical Guitar exercises.

To all the classical guitarists out there:

Recently I have gotten more into classical guitar. I used to just learn the melodies or each part individually, like vivaldi's four seasons and on top of bare mountain (cool one if you play the right parts in order :D) and several more. But I've never really gone much past that. I know a couple of pieces for classical guitar: Ode to joy, Fur Elise, Air on G, and some Minuet (I'm not sure which one). I was wondering what are some good exercises to warm-up with, build speed and technique, some other rather easy pieces, or just some tips and whatnot. Any input is appreciated, thanx. :)

noticingthemistake

I haven't tried to play it in a long time, but if memory serves me correctly, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata wasn't too hard to learn. Just a lot of different ways to finger it, and it sounds really cool, mellow sounding.

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/f_show_song.php3?id=16752

that's a pretty good tab.

Check that one out, I'll see if I can remember some others.

[Edited by Pantallica1 on 06-20-2003 at 05:50 PM]

the hardest thing about moonlight sonota is getting the rhythm down at certain parts and its a pretty big song...

Thanx Pantallica. That was a good tab, I found one before but it wasn't as good. I like when they give you a finger pattern with it, saves alot of time. :)

Yeah ketsueki, it is long but it's about time for something alittle more challenging. hah

Moonlight is a long tab but most of it is just repetition. Same pattern just moved different places on the fretboard. Glad I could help. I'm still trying to remember some of the classical pieces I used to play.

its a slow to moderate piece and if u were gonna learn the song,buy the little tab for it, the one at that site its far more difficult than the little paper books you can buy of it.. the hardest part for me is the when add the 3 same notes that sorta like da da daa..playing that and keeping the ryhthm of the other parts always confuzes me

Dunno if you'd play this on a classical guitar...but....I've been meaning to try Flight of the Bumblebee. I dont think that would be a good exercise though, more like suicide.

Pantallica -

Yeah I was messing around with it alittle. It's actually pretty easy. I haven't gotten to the part ketsueki is talking about, but it should be good for where I'm at now. Playing challenging parts is the only way to get better.

Ketsueki-

I'll check that out, but right now I'm kinda financially challenged. :)

Josh-

Haha. Yeah that song is a killer. I used to be able to play like the first 25-30 seconds of it on bass. After that the parts start to go out of range so I just gave up. Plus I couldn't get it up to the right tempo, I need to work more on my chromatics first.

Romance is a good one, good finger warm up, easy too learn and memorize, and good to woo the ladies with. It's in the public domain so it should be easy to find.
For a bit of a challenge try Bourree by Bach, very cool peice. Every time I play this one someone always comes up to me and says "oh, the Jethro Tull song".
Another cool one that I forgot about until a freind came over and started playing it one day is Mood For A Day by Steve Howe from Yes.

learn alot of back songs or warm up and play some andre segovia songs to..if there not to hard..i cant find any easy ones besides romance but im not sure if he wrote that or not..learn Canon in D,long beautiful piece..somewhat challinging at time

Thanx again guys! Romance was a good one, it was very easy and sounds great. It's the one in the tricks section right? When you play a song like that where the picking sequence is high e, b, g. Is it better to play it in sequence of pinky, ring, middle. One of the guys I jammed with went to school for classical guitar, to bad he moved away. But anyways he would pick each string with a different finger, like high e with the pinky, b with the ring finger, g with the middle finger, and d with the index finger, and use your thumb for the a and low e. He would adjust if he needed to but this the primary position his fingers were in. Is the best position for classical guitar or does it even matter??

I think the stuff segovia plays is alittle beyond me right now..hehe I hope to be able to play something by him in a year or so, but I haven't worked or planned anything out yet. I have a CD with him playing romantic pieces on the guitar and I think Romance is on there but I don't know if he wrote since he mostly does covers. Got a cd with him playing Bach, it's sweet. :)

I would use ring, middle, index, and then the thumb for strings 4,5,& 6.
Another song that's easy and in the public domain is a peice called Canary Jig. Apparently the melody is based off a native folk song from the Canary Islands. It's a pretty cool peice, utilizes drop D.
The Spanish Dances are pretty popular to. There's a series of them, each about 8 measures long. You can arrange them anyway you like or make up variations based on the themes.

Yeah, dont use your little finger at all, for the bass strings use your thumb then your 3 finger for the treble strings, usually(but not always) i(index) for g, m(middle) for b and a(ring) for e. Romance or Romanza is a traditional italian piece, the most famous version is by John Williams I believe, its the version I have on vinyl. Its quite an easy song, but requires the use of rest stroke on the e string with the ring finger. Rest stroke is where you push down into the string instead of plucking it(free stroke), this is how scales should be practiced. Using it here, enhances the melody of the e string, its a common technique used to single out a particular melody, but more often in contrast to a bass melody. Learn Greensleeves, its has more variety, and leaves more room for personalisation, though classical music pretty much restricts you to whats on the page, you can mess around with dynamics usually.

The piece Im trying to learn now is Recuerdos de la Alhambra, by Francisco Tarrega and performed by Segovia. Im not good enough yet, but I aiming to learn it within 6 months, it requires good tremelo technique, where you play the same string(usually treble) with 3 fingers very quickly and rhythmically while playing a seperate meoldy with the thumb, its quite difficult.

i cant get the tremelo down at all..its gonna take me a while to get it down..im not very cooridnated at all in my left hand..mainly from playin electric

Cool. Playing is alot easier without the pinky, it seems like the index finger just gets in the way now. Although I was practicing chromatics and it just seemed natural to use the pinky. So I don't completely neglect it.

That rest stroke just made romance alittle more difficult. Thanx dewd. ;) just kidding. It's hard to pluck the low e and then do that, seems more natural to pluck both. I'm working at it though.

Ketsueki, I know what you mean man. I feel like a newbie everytime I pick up the guitar and play some classical. It's cool though cause I get that feeling like you get when you first started playing guitar.

I definitely got some stuff to do over the summer. Thanx again guys.

Originally posted by noticingthemistake
That rest stroke just made romance alittle more difficult. Thanx dewd. ;) just kidding. It's hard to pluck the low e and then do that, seems more natural to pluck both. I'm working at it though.

Yeah, thats the bit Ive struggled with recently, to practice it play scales rest stroke alternating between i and m, and m and a. What I did then was to play scales like that while play the low e simulataneously. Musically shocking but it does the job!

Im struggling with the tremelo too, I do an exercise where I do tremelo on the open high e and pick the other five strings descending and ascending while holding an open e chord, Im gradually building up speed. The important thing is to maintain good timing throughout

I'm not too bad at tremelo picking, but I've heard some people do some pretty sick things with it.
Another one I forgot to mention is Carcassi' etude #7 in A minor, great peice, not to difficult.

Hey Notice......this may seem like a stupid question, but are you trying this stuff w/a nylon str. guitar? It will help when you grow your nails out, takes forever at 1st.

If you don't have a decent nylon str. you should check out Yamaha's Silent guitar, sounds and plays great. It's an electric nylon str. w/built in reverb, headphone jacks, etc. Figuring a half decent nylon will run you in the thousands, you can't beat it for $399, definetely sounds better then any acoustic you would get in that price range. The word is there getting ready to update/revamp it, the newer ones coming out will run about $150 more then the ones now.
Good luck, I caught the nylon str. craze about a year and a half ago, and it's a lot like starting all over, very frustrating at times. But the older I get the more I like the idea of being able to perform solo.

Naw I'm just playing it with a regular acoustic guitar. I'm looking into getting a nice nylon classical guitar soon as I get enough money saved up. I was actually looking at a yamaha last time I went to C.A. House (music store), I think they wanted 450 though. Which I didn't think was that bad. Yahama does actually make good guitars, suprisingly. I have a yahama bass and it's great. I don't know it was the silent guitar that your talking about, but it was a good guitar. Where did you see it for $399?? I'll definitely check that out man, that sounds like a killer deal. thanx. :)

Yeah it is fustrating cause your so used to doing more advanced things on electric. Then you jump over to playing classical and all of a sudden you got to learn to use your picking hand just as much as your fretting hand. I'm getting better at it, I worked on the rest stroke alittle today and it's getting to be less awkward. hah

I too enjoy playing solo, sometimes more than with a band. I think it's just the people I end up jamming with, I just never get the "spark" when we play. It's always some punk subgenre thing, which has been getting quite old in the last few years. And if I write a song I absolutely hate it once someone else tries to play it, cause there's no heart; it's just something to be played. There's just more freedom when your playing solo, especially in creativity and expression.

I agree totally. It's hard when you're with a band to express your own ideas to the fullest. That's what makes great bands. When you're able to jam with people that are on the same page as you, it's awesome.

And nylons are hard as heck to get used too. I borrowed a friends when I got into the whole classical thing and it was very difficult at first. Like you said, learning to do as much with your picking hand as your fretting hand takes some getting used too.

You know what's funny, you're picking hand is usually your dominant one, so you'd figure it'd be able to move much better than your other. Weird.

Originally posted by Pantallica1
You know what's funny, you're picking hand is usually your dominant one, so you'd figure it'd be able to move much better than your other. Weird.

Haha. Yeah that is pretty messed up, man. And after all that work with your less-dominant hand, it still doesn't work any better. hah

Yeah it is awesome when you do find the right chemistry in a band. I jammed with a group of guys and a gurl in high school and it was like that. I think it stems alot from just being good friends with whoever is in the band. The "magic" happens when your having a good time. After H.S it just became a weekend thing and that was about it. I found more time doing it solo so I just drifted off independantly. Going "solo" has it's good points just like being in a good band. Right now I'm more of a solo guy until I find the right people.