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Old 02-20-2020, 08:19 AM
Jimi2 Jimi2 is offline
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Default Learning classical pieces

How do you guys go about learning classical pieces? For me, it’s usually a hugely time consuming process as I need to memorize everything in order to be able to watch my left hand. And then I feel like it’s not benefitting my reading skills so much - I’m just slowly working out the fingerings, and then leaving the written page behind. I’m also studying folk/blues/jazz fingerstyle , and I’m almost through the first Frederick Noad book with my instructor, but I’m starting to wonder if I would be better served allocating practice time to other aspects. On the other hand, I do want to be a good reader, and I’m also interested in composition, so picking things up from study pieces is appealing. That’s hard as well though, because my instructor won’t really discuss theory. Any thoughts?
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Old 02-20-2020, 09:03 AM
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cliff_the_stiff cliff_the_stiff is offline
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Hi Jimi2-
I think your process is similar to anyone who is trying to learn classical music.
I think you are on the right track.

I don’t understand why a teacher would avoid theory- it’s pretty integral.
I can see focusing on the notes- and connecting it to chord structure and theory later...

Once folk finger styles become second nature for you- theory may be simpler to explain.
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Old 02-20-2020, 09:03 AM
charles Tauber charles Tauber is offline
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Learning to play music is much like any other human activity.

For most humans, following a well-planned progressive sequence of practice and study, while receiving objective correction and feedback from someone who has already achieved the skills and knowledge you'd like to have, saves time and effort and frequently leads to attaining a higher level of achievement. Usually, that takes the form of studying with a good teacher, that is, one that has the skills and knowledge you want to achieve/acquire, one that is good at teaching and who has really cares about your achieving what you want to achieve. In some cases, that might involve studying with more than one teacher.

Add to that that one needs to spend sufficient effort over a sustained period of time to attain that knowledge and skill. For most humans, to be really good at an endeavour takes a lot of commitment of time, effort, and, sometimes, money.

Learning music, including how to play the guitar, is no different. It takes a sustained commitment of time and effort that doesn't happen instantly. Patience is required, as is sustained commitment. Having a good teacher can drastically shorten how long it takes to reach one's goals, but one still has to put in the work.

As a beginner, you are learning multiple new things at the same time. That includes how to read music, how to translate that into notes on your chosen instrument, how to finger those notes as well as various other techniques. As you continue to work at each of those new skills, they will collectively improve. It can't be rushed and there are no shortcuts: one has to do the work.

As one plays a variety of music, if one pays attention - and has an aptitude for it - one begins to notice that certain repetative patterns emerge, such as repeatedly playing the same sequence of chords or notes. Effectively, this is to reverse engineer music - to try to discover its makeup, its underlying framework and principles through observation. It's the long way around. A much shorter way is to approach music from a progressive theoretical understanding of how it is built, how it is constructed. Traditionally, this has taken the form of a traditional study of music theory.

You state that you are also interested in composition. Again, one way to approach composition is to "randomly" put notes/chords together and, through trial and error, see which one's you like. Or, alternatively, copy existing music that you like, attempting to reverse engineer it. Depending upon your goals, that is the long way around. A more traditional approach is to study music theory to understand the structure of music and its harmonic principles - those used in composition. It might be that these are best studied on their own with a teacher well-suited to teaching those things.
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Old 02-20-2020, 09:28 AM
Le Chef Le Chef is offline
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Reading for classical guitar is at least 4 times more difficult than reading for monophonic instruments like flute, clarinet, and trumpet, so don't let those flute players intimidate you. Even if you are only reading one note at a time, it may appear in 4 different places on the guitar's fingerboard, and usually at least 3, and ALWAYS at least two, other than the low E on the 6th string. The trumpet NEVER plays more than one note at a time.

I can sight read for classical guitar if it's very simple, in first position, and has no more than 3 notes at a time. And it took years of sight reading simple pieces, one after the other. Up above the 7th fret? No way .... just plod through it and repeat each measure ten times a day for a week.

I also think that piano is easier to sight read, because again, while polyphonic, you don't have to worry about where that G flat note is on a piano. Of course, sight reading Rachmaninoff on piano is a different kettle of fish.

I think if you spend 4 hours a day doing nothing but reading, in a year you'll of course be better, but I don't see the point. I'd use the time learning repertoire, one measure at a time.
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Old 02-20-2020, 09:36 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimi2 View Post
How do you guys go about learning classical pieces? For me, it’s usually a hugely time consuming process as I need to memorize everything in order to be able to watch my left hand. And then I feel like it’s not benefitting my reading skills so much - I’m just slowly working out the fingerings, and then leaving the written page behind. I’m also studying folk/blues/jazz fingerstyle , and I’m almost through the first Frederick Noad book with my instructor, but I’m starting to wonder if I would be better served allocating practice time to other aspects. On the other hand, I do want to be a good reader, and I’m also interested in composition, so picking things up from study pieces is appealing. That’s hard as well though, because my instructor won’t really discuss theory. Any thoughts?
You initially the learn the piece from the score but you can master it without the score (of course if you are quite good at reading music scores
you can reference to it even after you are very good at playing it (think orchestra players).
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Old 02-20-2020, 12:50 PM
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I just started classical, but the pieces I have started on are available as notation with tab. I'm just an older gent giving this a try, but I see no point in playing the guitar while trying to read piano music. I can read notes and rests, understand timing, etc btw.

As a practical matter, for a guitar soloist, I see no point to the "reading" skill that traditional classical guitarist obsess over.
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Old 02-20-2020, 02:45 PM
charles Tauber charles Tauber is offline
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Originally Posted by TBman View Post
I just started classical, but....I see no point to the "reading" skill that traditional classical guitarist obsess over.
Perhaps, after you've played classical music for a while you might see some value in it.

As an aside, I've never found "traditional classical guitarists" to obsess over being able to read standard music notation. What I find odd is the resistance of many guitar players to learn the standard notation that has been used nearly universally for the last several centuries to communicate music in writing. It is the equivalent of a writer (author) being unwilling to learn how to read or write the printed word. Where would authors be if they could only impart what they want to say verbally, without writing it down? Where would WE be if there was no written record of the ideas of those who came before us?

Certainly, there are genres of music that are not written down - folk music, some blues, for example - and they are passed from one person to another as "oral tradition". Similarly, there are purely oral presentations, monologues and stories that are passed from one generation to the next in the form of oral tradition. Imagine, however, how little would remain if none of it was recorded by being written down, be it music or written ideas.

Having a good ear, allowing one to listen to something and then play it back, is also an important musical skill. There are lots of potentially important and useful skills. "Important" and "useful" depend upon what you want from your endeavour, what kinds of music you want to play and what kinds of abilities you want to have.


One of my classical guitar teachers, with whom I also studied music theory, would sight-read orchestral scores and play them real-time allowing us to listen to them and to discuss them. As far as I know, no one has yet transcribed them for solo guitar and written them down in guitar tablature.
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Old 02-20-2020, 03:48 PM
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I have recently gotten back into classical guitar. In fact my goal for this new year was to learn one piece a month and have 12 by the end of the year. So far I am on 4 so I am ahead of the game. For me patience is the key. I start off any piece I am learning by listening to it a lot. Then I will have the sheet music out and a video of someone playing it that I can go back and forth to. I also play a very slow tempo at first. You have to repeat repeat and repeat till it just burns in or sort of like programs they synapse of your brain. In any learning you are literally building brain cell highways to the functional memory of the brain. And repetition is key to that and that requires patience.

Also if you have lofty goals that are impossible to reach it can be very frustrating. Make simple goals, achieve them and move on.

As for sheet music I like it when they put in the little numbers that suggest what finger position to play. It helps me read while playing. Even better is when the music and the tab are written together.
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Old 02-20-2020, 07:11 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by charles Tauber View Post
Perhaps, after you've played classical music for a while you might see some value in it.

As an aside, I've never found "traditional classical guitarists" to obsess over being able to read standard music notation. What I find odd is the resistance of many guitar players to learn the standard notation that has been used nearly universally for the last several centuries to communicate music in writing. It is the equivalent of a writer (author) being unwilling to learn how to read or write the printed word. Where would authors be if they could only impart what they want to say verbally, without writing it down? Where would WE be if there was no written record of the ideas of those who came before us?

Certainly, there are genres of music that are not written down - folk music, some blues, for example - and they are passed from one person to another as "oral tradition". Similarly, there are purely oral presentations, monologues and stories that are passed from one generation to the next in the form of oral tradition. Imagine, however, how little would remain if none of it was recorded by being written down, be it music or written ideas.

Having a good ear, allowing one to listen to something and then play it back, is also an important musical skill. There are lots of potentially important and useful skills. "Important" and "useful" depend upon what you want from your endeavour, what kinds of music you want to play and what kinds of abilities you want to have.


One of my classical guitar teachers, with whom I also studied music theory, would sight-read orchestral scores and play them real-time allowing us to listen to them and to discuss them. As far as I know, no one has yet transcribed them for solo guitar and written them down in guitar tablature.

Maybe "obsess" is too strong a word.

I never implied that music shouldn't be written or notation be learned, its just that piano music, as I call notation without tab, isn't as helpful as notation with tab underneath and insisting that only notation be learned without tab is sort of silly only because more information is a good thing, not a bad thing.

For example, the G note that can played on the 1st string, 3rd fret can also be played 8th fret, 2nd string and of course the 12th fret, 3rd string. Any guitarist with any sort of experience will know from the context of the other notes where it should be played. However, tab tells the player immediately where the note should be played.

If two people of equal skill and experience learned the same piece and one learned with notation only and the other learned the piece with notation and tab, could a listener tell the difference? No of course not.

On the other hand, reading notation only, trains the player to think in notes, not in frets, which is a good thing too. Notation with tab can result in players with great playing skills who can't name the notes they are playing, which is not a good thing.
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Old 02-20-2020, 10:29 PM
charles Tauber charles Tauber is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TBman View Post
...piano music, as I call notation without tab...
Music scored to be played on a piano is typically written in two clefs, a bass clef and a treble clef. Music scored for the guitar is almost always written in a single treble clef.

If one handed a piano player music scored for a guitar and told him or her that it was "piano music", the piano player would probably just shake his (or her) head and mutter under his (or her) breath something unkind regarding one's level of musical knowledge.

Quote:
...isn't as helpful as notation with tab underneath and insisting that only notation be learned without tab is sort of silly only because more information is a good thing, not a bad thing.
In its day, the lute was more commonly played than any other (Western) instrument. Music for the lute was almost always written down in tablature. Given the complexity of some lute music, it was a challenge to accurately notate it.

If you have every tried to arrange/transcribe music written for the lute, you'd appreciate the difficulty of the process since to do so, one must know the tuning of the lute - it wasn't universally standard - and "calculate" what each note is in the tablature. To do so, you must recreate the landscape so that the map - the tablature - that tells you where to go has some reference.

There is the same problem with guitar tablature. Suppose you write a duet for guitar and, say, flute or voice. If you score the music in guitar tablature, it will be essentially useless for the flute player or singer. By contrast, if you scored it in standard music notation, you could give the music to any other musician in nearly any other instrument and they could play it - probably sight read it. It is like giving someone a printed story that is written in an unknown language: the person reading the story has to know the original language for the story to be intelligible.

Quote:
For example, the G note that can played on the 1st string, 3rd fret can also be played 8th fret, 2nd string and of course the 12th fret, 3rd string. Any guitarist with any sort of experience will know from the context of the other notes where it should be played. However, tab tells the player immediately where the note should be played.
And, there's the rub. Welcome to classical music and classical guitar. The "right" place to play a particular pitch is part of what is involved in creating an interpretation of the music one is playing. Each of the three G notes you mentioned has a different timbre. A player might purposely chose to play the note in one place rather than another due to the timbre of that note and how he or she wants that note to sound, or, perhaps because of the difference in "approach" - what comes before or after that note.

Take the open first string, the note E. It can also be played as a fretted note on the second or third string. Suppose that is a note in a melody. You might want to add vibrato to that note. You might want to add glissando (slide) to the note. You can't do either of those with the open string. To do so, you'd have to chose one of the other options. Suppose you wanted to add vibrato to the G note you mentioned. Playing at the 3rd fret, first string, won't allow a lot of vibrato: it is too close to the nut, making the string behave more stiffly. If you wanted a strong vibrato, you'd probably have better success playing it at a higher fret on a lower string.

This is part of what make the guitar unique compared to many other instruments - that a single pitch can be played in more than one place, with more than one sound and expression.

If you have tablature that says put your finger "here", the player will have the added step of having to first figure out what note that is. If it is standard musical notation, the player already knows that. Extend that to multiple notes at the same time (e.g. chords). When one is well versed in theory and sight reading, one can immediately identify the chord allowing one to substitute a different chord for that one, or a different inversion, or different voicing.

Quote:
If two people of equal skill and experience learned the same piece and one learned with notation only and the other learned the piece with notation and tab, could a listener tell the difference? No of course not.
Maybe, maybe not. Tablature tends to teach players where to put their fingers while not "informing" them of the larger musical picture. It might be that the player who learned standard music notation tries different fingerings, different voicings that the person who only reads tablature - and where to put one's fingers - might not.

In the end, it is about music and the playing and understanding thereof. There is an entire world of music out there that isn't available as guitar tablature. Why limit oneself? Do you want to be a musician who's instrument is the guitar or do you want to be a guitar player? They aren't necessarily the same thing.

Last edited by charles Tauber; 02-20-2020 at 10:39 PM.
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Old 02-20-2020, 10:30 PM
Taylor814 Taylor814 is offline
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I think tablature only helps if you don't read very well. The better you read the less useful it is. I've been working on several Andrew York pieces that are all expertly transcribed by York, but only in notation, no tab. I find that my reading has dramatically improved to the point where I can actually play them by sight better than I can from memory. I also feel that tab doesn't generally do a very good job of denoting rhythm; even if I'm reading from the tab I always use the notation to play the correct rhythm. Lastly, from my experience I have found that if there are any mistakes in the transcription they are always in the tab, not the notation.
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Old 02-21-2020, 06:10 AM
Dr O’Fluf Dr O’Fluf is offline
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I'm with @TBman on this. I started learning in my mid-fifties and am impatient so tab is the natural place to start to get quick results. Whilst notation has been around for ages that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the only or the best way to represent music.

As I've used tab I've become convinced that well written tab* is actually a better way to convey music for a guitar than notation. For me at least. By way of example playing the open D could also be the A string at the fifth fret or E string at the tenth. Each will be subtly different and whilst notation is ambiguous the tab will present the intention clearly. The player can then add their own variations if desired. It also means I can cope with alternate tunings easily.

*and bad tab with notation can also be usuable
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Old 02-21-2020, 06:32 AM
cdkrugjr cdkrugjr is offline
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Tab pre-dates "standard" notation for fretted strings (Lute, Vihuela, Renn 4-Course guitar etc..) Keyboard, and the instrument we now call a "Whistle" (strictly speaking a 6-hole diatonic flute).

It's better for some things, e.g. which string do I play this note on, more difficult for others, e.g. timing of complex counterpoint.

I Just transcribed the "guitar" (4-course) music of Mudarra From the original Italian (inverted) tablature To modern notation.

Fun Fact: In a few places Mudarra's original tab calls for a Very unlikely stretch when there's a perfectly reasonable stretch on the next string.

I kept both the modern notation and the modern tab for the reason I gave above: The modern notation makes it easy to see the flow of the 3-4 voice counterpoint, but the tab represents the work I did ensuring I had consistent string assignments.

"Horses for courses" and all that.
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Old 02-21-2020, 06:36 AM
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going back to the OP original question; There's a nice book called "The Classical Guitar Collection" by Joseph Harris from Hal Leonard. 50 favorites by 26 composers & all of which are provided in standard notation and TAB.

FWIW - Way back in the 60's when learning guitar, my instructor had me learn to read sheet music at the same time. Whenever I wanted to learn a new tune. We went to the front of his studio and I bought the sheet music.

Unfortunately, I became "paper trained". I couldn't play anything without having sheet music in front of me.

My experience with several "classical" players that I've encountered is that they're in the same predicament. They've been stumped to be able to play anything new without having sheet music in front of them.

But for me it became too annoying when working on a new piece via standard notation to discover that I was playing it at the wrong location on the guitar fretboard.

I'd have spent hours noting right hand fingering & left hand positions on the sheet music only to have to start all over again.

If I have just the tab, hearing the music via audio or video will give me all the "feel" I might be lacking.

I'll go along with the use of both standard notation and tab.

Having both gives the feel AND an indication of where the notes are going to be on the fretboard.

Anyone who thinks that the amateur player is limiting their exposure to classical pieces because of an inability to read standard notation hasn't looked at what's available on the internet these days.

There is tons of music available with both TAB and Standard notation on the music.

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Old 02-21-2020, 09:51 AM
Jimi2 Jimi2 is offline
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Thanks all. Sounds like I need to just continue slogging through with the memorization and the reading skill will come in time. I’m a pretty solid intermediate player overall - and have just gotten serious again in the last 18 months...My ultimate goal is not to be a great classical player, as that doesn’t fully align with my interests, so there’s a lot of different aspects for me to focus on - the reading, the theory, the ear training, composition, and all the different genres I’m into. I guess it’s just frustrating that I have to spend so much time memorizing pieces, then go to my lesson, get a “yeah that sounds good” from my teacher and then move on, forgetting the piece I just slaved over. He’s a very talented player in multiple genres, and a long ago conservatory guy, but I’m starting to think he’s not a great teacher. I basically get NO exercises, or ear training guidance, and we only discuss theory superficially if I really pin him down with questions. I do write my own music, so like I said earlier, analyzing the pieces’ structure is definitely of interest.

Part of my original motivation for learning to read was the hope that eventually I’d be able to write down music I hear in my head, and also that I could read written music and hear/sing it without an instrument. Unfortunately, I was always discouraged from being musical in my youth, so I’m just getting underway with the reading in mid life though I’m working hard. I’m starting to wonder if that goal of being that proficient is too lofty....
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