By Gohar Vardanyan
As musicians and instrumentalists we spend many hours alone in a practice room. Practicing is one of the most private aspects of our work as musicians. Most of us, if not all, prefer the lonely battle with our instrument. We can have the privacy to play with mistakes, buzzing notes, too fast for our fingers to catch up and too slow for anyone to stay awake… However, I have always wanted to witness someone else’s practice session and preparation, without their knowledge, of course. Whenever we hear a …
Muriel Anderson is respected as one of the world’s foremost fingerstyle guitarists. She is the founder of the All Star Guitar Night and Music for Life Alliance, performs internationally, and gives workshops. This is her Mel Bay Artist Interview with Erica Cantrell. She also teaches a Mel Bay Pro Lick.
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by Tim Sheehan
The pentatonic scale is probably the most essential scale for a guitarist playing any style, and is a great point of departure for all kinds of harmonic inventions. Here’s three fairly simple applications, using basic diatonic chords but inserting tones from other pentatonic scales besides the obvious corresponding one. Starting with Amaj7:
(Fig 1)
The obvious scale for Amaj7 would be A major pentatonic (F# min. pentatonic), but try C#- pent. and you get a slightly different sound, but still completely tonal. (try B maj. pentatonic for a similar effect, …
by Gohar Vardanyan
The classical guitar has seen many changes in the last century. Its repertoire is becoming more and more challenging and interesting thanks to new compositions, new arrangements, and many newly discovered compositions. Guitar performances today are cleaner and are executed with greater technical facility than ever before. Perhaps one of the most important areas that garners increased attention today is the quality and richness of sound. When we listen to other musicians—violinists, pianists, cellists—we hear beautiful sound and music. We do not hear technique or reduced sound quality. …
by Richard Gilewitz
June 2010 brought about one of the more exciting short tours in my career as I was invited to participate in the Miami International Guitar Festival in Coral Gables, Florida. Under the leadership of Dr. Rene Gonzalez, director of the University of Miami’s Classical Guitar program at the Frost School of Music, the festival was made up of performers from Spain, Vietnam, Italy, Venezuela, Canada, Pakistan, and America for three evening concerts spanning over the weekend.
During the in-residence instructional portion of the festival, Dr. Gonzalez and Pakistani-born guitar …
by Tim Sheehan
Build a chord out of any set of intervals, then try and rearrange the notes in that chord to get different sounding structures using the same notes. If you use 4 notes, you can get as many as 24 different chords. Generally only a few of them might have any color (depending on the structures you’ve chosen), but with these additional chords you can come up with even more sounds, just by figuring the inversions of each chord, as well as the diatonic chord scales. So with one …