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Dear guitarists: These three pieces, two etudes by Mauro Giuliani and one very important excerpt from Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Prelude No. 4, offer an opportunity to teach us many important technical details while we play and work on great-sounding music.
First up, the Etude 11, Op. 100, from Giuliani can be seen as a study in playing cleanly.
Have you ever spent time admiring how harp players stop their strings all the time?! Even in the midst of full tutti fortes from the orchestra, they very quickly stop the strings so they don’t bleed into the next harmony or slip into the next phrase, etc.
We should be like them and be thankful we don’t have so many strings — YIKES! So if you learn to stop all of the open strings on this first study, you will learn an important lesson in cleanliness.
Bass lines, unless they outline a chord at the end of a section, should be a single voice. I joke with my students that the way they play bass lines, they would need two and sometimes three singers to represent that one line.
I use the pedal sign (from piano) to indicate that one should quickly reach back with the thumb and sometimes LH fingers to stop the previous bass note after you play the new bass note. This way, the two notes kiss briefly (sexy, huh?).
Taking two adjacent open bass notes, E and A, use them to practice plucking with a light rest stroke on low E and then play A free stroke and stop the low E immediately. Repeat these movements over and over until it feels quick, relaxed, and easy. Then do it with E and D strings without the rest stroke.
I also use an asterisk to indicate when a higher open string needs to be stopped with a LH finger fretting the new note and leaning into the old open string, “nipping it in the bud,” so to speak.
Use these two methods of stopping strings in addition to just stopping the bass with your thumb to “play” the rests and also carefully lifting the LH fingers to mute fretted notes with the LH fingertips before taking the finger off the string.
Boy, learning piano would’ve been so much easier. I’ve told folks that even if you have not played a note on the piano, you could learn Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1 in LESS TIME than on our instrument!
I came across Etude 11 when I auditioned a new student, and once I studied it, I realized it was too hard for her. But you can do it, right?
Regarding the pairing of Exercise No. 5, Op. 48, by Giuliani and Prelude 4 by Villa-Lobos: It may surprise some of you to see the piece that inspired the middle section of Villa-Lobos’s Prelude 4. For at least six years, I started every practice session playing the entire middle section of the Prelude 4 in a myriad of patterns. I have printed the Exercise 5 in simple sixteenth-note groups of four notes rather than the sextuplet version at measure 20 so you can more easily work these four-note ascending p, i, m, a arpeggios.
Now, all of my comments will be about Prelude 4. First off, when taking about right-hand workouts like the Villa-Lobos, I need to put in a plug for the daily work on rasgueados.
Agustín Barrios was really into daily physical exercise, and his surviving students have told us in the recent Barrios Method, which I reviewed a while back, that in the daily morning class Barrios had a series of rasgueados that he put his students through. Can you think of why he did this? Answer: By working the extensor muscles, pushing the fingers out, you get ample rewards on being able to pull the fingers back in. This is why folks who started out in flamenco (like Julian Burbano, our April 20 artist) have fast scales and very accurate right-hand technique!!
So do at least four minutes of strumming a day. Use Leo Brouwer’s Etude No. 6 and place your thumb on the sixth string for most of that study. This excerpt is also great for four-stringed rasgueados.
When starting the Prelude 4 excerpt, first work all the chords in what I call severe staccato as in measure 17. Try to keep your RH wrist relaxed as you return quickly to the strings to create the short block chords. Then work the chords in oom-pah treatment, which is bass/chord, separating the thumb from i, m, and a for effect.
As we pluck the thumb, we land the three fingers. As we pluck the three fingers, we land the thumb. Next is the “planted” p, i, m, a arpeggio, such that you land all four fingers on the strings as you pluck p. This is the best way to perform this middle section so that you can bring out the singing (cantabile) bass line melody, which importantly needs to be played rest stroke for best delineation.
Now, to update our right-hand work, we need to point out that, thanks to the fine teachings of Aaron Shearer, most of our four-note ascending arpeggios outside this piece should be played like this: The very first arpeggio is done as listed above, landing all four fingers as you pluck p. And then return p to the bass string a brief microsecond after you pluck the a finger, as if the initiation of the movement of the a finger instructs the thumb to “get back to it, pal!”
Then, as you pluck p, land the three fingers. Be happy it’s just six strings that we need to control. So until next time. ...
Wait! I forgot the left hand. Slide only the fourth finger without sound as a guide up and down the second string as you carefully lift the other fingers (to avoid the scratchy sounds), and in the final section (which is not printed), it is the third finger that slides on the third string, etc. Now, believe it or not, how you lift those fingers matters (why can’t we get a lucky break once in a while?). You must lift the finger straight up (in relation to the windings on the bass strings). If you lift them at an angle, they will produce that scratchy sound. Now you know.
I hope this has been helpful; break over.
- Randy Reed, Music Editor