What are some incredibly challenging yet immensely popular songs you play?

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Originally Posted by grathan

Classical Gas, that's a great tune! Very first song I ever attempted to fingerpick (and still can't play it!).

Recuerdos de la Alhambra wow talk about a finger killer! Is that a single guitar? I couldn't tell from any of the youtube videos I watch. They all look like they are casually plucking, but there is an intense tremolo style picking going on in the audio.

On a side note, your original compositions are very enjoyable. They convey emotion while seemingly flowing freely. Almost like you recorded while just playing, not rehearsed if that makes sense.

Recuerdos de la Alhambra is all tremolo from start to finish (except for the last measure or so), with a walking bass line. And yes, it all comes out of one guitar played by one person. The big challenge is learning to do the tremolo picking pattern. Once you have that down (which takes quite a bit of work) the piece is actually not very complicated. But I spent a LOT of time on this piece. Once I had the tremolo technique working (which took me about a year) and the piece memorized, I played the piece through at least two or three times a day nearly every day for another year before I felt pretty good about it!

I did a quick Google search and found this, which appears to be just the A part - this gives you an idea of how the piece is structured (every measure looks like this (except for the last one or two measures) with 24 notes per measure): http://www.guitar-dreams.com/modules...cal/140TAB.gif

At one point I calculated how many notes there are in the whole piece, and I think I came up with something in the neighborhood of 1600 notes (all played in about 3 and a half minutes or so, if you are really good, or 5 or 6 minutes if you are me).

(And thanks for the comments on my recordings. A lot of effort went into getting to the point of being able to record those and have them sound halfway decent. Interestingly, working out the nuances of Sheebeg and Sheemore, which is one of the slower pieces, probably took the most time!).

[vts]

Originally Posted by posternutbag

The general consensus among my classical guitar friends is that Joaquin Rodrigo's "Invocacion y Danza" is among the most challenging pieces in the standard classical guitar repetoire:

This one is quite insane. A beautiful piece though.

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Originally Posted by vts

This one is quite insane. A beautiful piece though.

Indeed. And it looks like it would be kind of crazy-complicated to learn and master as well!

[Sixfir]

This one is a hot one

http://youtu.be/9MUwb3eNZzE