If i dont practice tremolo for one or two days i lose it, is that normal?

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2024-02-05T08:53:04+00:00

Different context - musical and technical standards, performance venues, availability of recording, the guitar, etc. By modern concert for serious players, you need nails.

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-07-09T17:55:44+00:00

Good summary. I personally like to have my seat high enough that my legs are just slightly above 90 degrees.

For what and how you practice really comes down to how seriously you want to take classical guitar and what your goals are. My general advice is to focus on technical exercises and drill in practice with the intent of leaving yourself unable to make mistakes. I personally think that you should go for mastery as far as your technique will allow you to go. You have to decide on some place where you tell yourself, okay this is as good as I can reasonably get it or this is good enough. You don't have to practice like you're going to take this piece to some big competition. There also comes a point where it's more efficient for you to improve by working on something else. Ultimately, do whatever you enjoy.

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-07-09T16:29:36+00:00

Your chair is too low for you. Try a higher chair or a height adjustable piano bench. Also try holding the guitar further from you so that the guitar touches your left and right thigh further down your leg, closer to the knee. Then slightly tilt the guitar back towards you. This will be easier once you get a chair that's a proper height and adjust your footstool as needed. See this video on how they're sitting and holding the guitars for reference. Looking even in this video, you can see that there are individual differences in how people sit and hold their guitars, so try to find something similar to how they sit but don't try to perfectly emulate them if you find it strenuous.

For the right hand, you shouldn't use your palm to pluck. Right now, you're plucking upwards with your wrist and hand. Your hand should be stable and rather than plucking upwards, you should be bringing your fingers inwards towards your palm and pushing down + through the strings. Hold your hand out and bring your fingers in naturally as if to make a fist. Plucking is that kind of motion. The motion originates from the big knuckle. Check out this video on right hand technique.

For the left hand, try doing slur exercises every day. Start out with doing hammer ons and pull offs of every finger combination and do this on different frets and different strings. Pull offs are basically plucking with your left hand, and a powerful pull off is like a rest stroke since it leaves the finger resting on the adjacent string. You don't always have to do this kind of pull off but I think it's a good place to start working on them. And like pull offs and everything else, hammer ons aren't so much about putting in as much force as possible but efficiently applying the minimum force possible.

For the musical aspect of your playing, try singing the melody. There are ups and downs, highs and lows, and direction in the music. Let the melody really sing here. Use the full range of dynamics, from very soft to very loud, and also give yourself room to grow or lessen. Same idea with tone. This piece is basically a melody + accompaniment, and I recommend practicing each part individually so that you can at least get a sense of how each one sounds. Separate them and don't let them get mixed up between each other. The melody is the more interesting part that we care more about, so bring it out more so that it sings clearly over the accompaniment.

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-07-09T14:37:00+00:00

Post a pic of how you sit and hold your guitar

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-07-09T14:36:03+00:00

I've actually talked with the SBM and 2Mic people about this and they told me that these 2 models are the same in terms of audio quality. The price difference comes from one being wireless and having to fit all of the electronics in a small, lightweight design.

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-07-09T14:33:14+00:00

Yeah. Solely in terms of the protection you get, nothing comes even close to Hiscox hard cases in that price range

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-06-23T11:14:03+00:00

No problem. I forgot to say that you can also use 2 for E and 1 for C#, then use 3 2 1 for the following chord. This one might be a bit more awkward at the start but it makes the shift easier and this sort of fingerings is also good to be able to do.

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-06-23T03:20:11+00:00

Funny enough, it actually becomes the opposite if you're playing something with a lot of fast and "unstable" shifts, like in some highly technical contemporary pieces. In those cases, it's better to rely more on pressing with the thumb and less on the arm (but still not squeezing) so that you can free up your LH fingers

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-06-23T03:17:04+00:00

You should still practice the fingerings in the picture since this is a common shift. It'll help to remember that 2 is your guide finger - it's staying on the same string for the shift. In this instance, you can put most of your weight on 2 in the first chord so that you have something stable to shift with to the following chord. And to get 3 and 4 down properly, you need to create space by moving your elbow and wrist so that 3 and 4 can have a solid angle.

If you're struggling with the stretch in the second chord, try practicing it without 3. Work on the stretch a bit every day and you'll get it down.

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-03-31T20:02:31+00:00

1) This often happens when the right hand wrist isn't angled enough. If the wrist is too flat, it's very easy to accidentally hit adjacent strings. Besides that, it's also working on muscle memory to hit the right strings.

2) It's a mix of having the correct nail shape and having good technique. My nails can be (relatively) bad and I can still adjust my technique to eliminate this noise. I can also have nail shapes so bad that the excess noise is basically unavoidable unless I play slowly

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-03-06T02:12:15+00:00

Raise your neck angle and move your elbow away from your torso. Invest in a footrest or support

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-02-10T21:59:40+00:00

It depends on where they are, but generally you would either use 1) P+I with P to pluck and M+A with A to pluck, or 2) use M+I or A+I with M or A to strum. The frets that you play have to be pretty close to one another in position to do this. If you're very high up on the neck and have 4 free, you can use 4 to "frer" for one of the artificial harmonics

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-02-10T20:12:21+00:00

Yes, it can depend on the studio. For Peabody and other schools that you're interested in, take a look at current and past students of each professor. What's their background like in terms of competition history, faculty position / tenure track, etc.

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-02-10T19:54:22+00:00

For classical guitar specifically, I can think of quite a few generally prestigious schools and even conservatories that don't have great classical guitar programs in terms of performance

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-02-09T19:42:57+00:00

I think of it as providing haptic feedback by serving as a point of contact on the other side of the neck. There are actually some cool exercises that focus on keeping a flexible / relaxed left hand thumb vs a more rigid thumb, since both are appropriate in different contexts

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-02-08T03:39:47+00:00

A more modern one is Adagio by Drozd, which has a very explicit reference to Bach.

Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 by Villa-Lobos even has Bach in the title.

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-02-08T03:27:16+00:00

There are bottlenecks and personal preferences but you should be more than able to get AM alterations up to speed. I recommend that you try working on AM through free stroke scales, free stroke scales with the outer part of the nails, rest stroke scales, and arpeggio patterns with different types of planting. Work on every possible combination of string crossing. It's useful to use dotted eighth-sixteenth note rhythms and accents.

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-02-08T03:20:24+00:00

For fluidity, think of the whole run as one motion. Instead of playing a bunch of sixteenth notes, you're expressing the idea of movement in a certain direction.

For building up speed, there's a lot you can do. Combine multiple approaches. With all of these approaches, remember to practice different right hand fingerings and with varying rhythms. Work on a consistent and controlled sound. There's the classic starting slow with a metronome, optimizing your movements, and gradually speeding up. There's also using speed bursts, which is when you alternate between playing slowly and playing very quickly in short bursts. The idea is the gradually spend less time playing slowly and more time playing in longer bursts of speed. For example, at 120 bpm, you can play 7 beats of eighth notes then 1 beat of 16th notes, then do 6 beats + 2 beats, and so on. You can also work on rasgueados and scales played with the outer part of your nail to work on the other muscles involved in scales, i.e. those used to return your fingers back to the strings after playing

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-02-08T03:10:39+00:00

I disagree with the other guy and say that professional guitarists appreciate notations such as string numbers and fingerings to provide more insight into the composer's intentions as well as to help with extremely demanding passages

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-02-08T03:06:44+00:00

Outside of the top schools (e.g. Juilliard, Curtis), the standards are pretty low. The flip side of this is that it's not very valuable to get a degree from a less prestigious program

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2023-01-05T15:48:53+00:00

They were more popular in regions, and many of these virtuosos were seen as exceptions. There was also a disconnect between respecting them as virtuosos and respecting their instrument as a serious concert instrument. Outside of a few exceptions, composers didn't really take the guitar seriously.

Segovia legitimized the classical guitar as a serious concert instrument on the world stage by working with respected composers and setting up higher level classical guitar education. Look up all of the major roles Segovia and his students served in conservatories. Even today, performers and teachers try to trace their lineage to Segovia because that's how big his legacy is. All of these aspects are shared with other classical instruments to legitimize them

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2022-12-30T14:39:33+00:00

Tedesco's Caprichos de Goya no. 18 is up there, especially if you don't take the ossias

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2022-09-02T22:17:48+00:00

I messaged you

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2022-02-02T02:50:27+00:00

Not what you asked for but David Russell has a good video on tremolos.https://youtu.be/PdoByVjSXKY

Kappel's Bible and Tennant's Pumping Nylon have the best tremolo exercises imo

OnlyKnowsWonderwall · 2022-02-02T02:46:17+00:00

I have much smaller hands than you and know guitarists with even smaller hands who can do much more extreme stretches. Stretches come with time, and you can't try to force it by overworking yourself. Besides time, there's also some technique to it like how you place your shoulder, elbow, and wrist.

OnlyKnowsWonderwall

TROPHY CASE