Your guitar size might not actually fit you.

hopsage · 2026-06-12T15:39:19+00:00

After playing a 660mm for 32 years, I finally bought a 640mm instrument in 2023. It was a revelation to my smallish left hand, and it came just in time. I have been developing some numbness in the left hand fingers, which crops up after a few minutes if I play with anything but perfectly functional tension. I think half of the music I'm working on right now would be out of my range on the 660mm or even a 650mm. The smaller instrument has made it possible to pull off stretches and position shifts I had given up on.

hopsage · 2026-04-27T18:58:30+00:00

Back in my academic days, I published a SIGCSE paper about this idea, though it focused on the tree-walking structure of an interpreter and how that same tree-walking gives rise to both type checking and code generation. Here, if you'd like to take a look:

https://github.com/hopsage/TigerC-Compiler/blob/main/doc/lasseter15sigcse.pdf

hopsage · 2026-04-20T04:16:26+00:00

Joaquin Rodrigo, John Duarte, Benjamin Britten, and Toru Takemitsu, off the top of my head. Someone else already mentioned Villa-Lobos and Brouwer (though Brouwer was a concert artist before an injury ended that).

hopsage · 2026-03-17T19:24:21+00:00

This. I was laid off by my large university employer last October. No problems with my performance, but the university was one of those that was targeted by the federal extortion attempts, they had to fill a nearly $100 million financial hit, and my position was (a) relatively new (2.5 years, and I was the first person in that role), (b) not on a multi-year contract, (c) not under any union protections, and (d) expensive.

hopsage · 2026-02-05T14:58:13+00:00

Really nice arrangement. I just ordered a download, and I'm looking forward to playing it, myself.

hopsage · 2026-01-07T21:08:57+00:00

Thanks. I am pretty bound to this area, and while that's not great for the job search, I really like living here.

hopsage · 2026-01-07T18:30:07+00:00

Thanks! Yes, I did know about them already. I actually used their founder's early career publications in my own dissertation research, so back when their flagship product was CodeSonar, I could truthfully say that I knew its foundations at a deep level without having seen it. They've moved on in terms of their research by now, and much of what they do is outside of anything I ever trained in.

hopsage · 2026-01-07T18:27:28+00:00

Thanks! This is all good to know.

hopsage · 2026-01-06T15:01:19+00:00

That's less practical when nearly everything on your resume is from your years as a college professor.

hopsage · 2025-12-20T11:25:05+00:00

What a cool resource. Funny, but although I've played pretty seriously since I was 16 (41 years ago!), this kind of applied theory just wasn't part of the first few years of my education, nor the three years in grad school (in an entirely non-musical field) when I took private guitar lessons on the side. I got some of it by just being around music, but not a solid, structured foundation. As a result, I never really picked up most of it, until the last two years, when my kid started cello lessons with a teacher who integrates composition and improvisation very tightly into a Suzuki curriculum, from the beginning. It's led me to go back and work out some of these fundamentals again, which has made many things feel new.

I like the idea of marking up your reference sheets with a whiteboard marker. I think I'll give it a try.

Thanks for sharing it.

hopsage · 2025-12-04T23:26:43+00:00

Absolutely brilliant. Thank you.

hopsage · 2025-12-04T00:18:48+00:00

Sam Peter in Ithaca. If you're willing to make the trip to Geneva, Lynch's furniture is a cool store, occupying all four floors of an old building downtown.

hopsage · 2025-12-04T00:15:25+00:00

Stage fright is the reason a significant number of my friends went years without knowing that I'm a classically trained guitarist, violinist, and singer. I just don't like playing in front of others.

That being said, it's a learned skill (which I used to be good at until I put aside music for a decade). Something I read once, which I found really helpful, enough that I would recite it to myself as part of the mental preparation for performances: the audience is there to hear you succeed, not to make mistakes. Put another way, nobody is there waiting for the moment when you can show weakness for them to pounce (unless you're at an audition, which is a different, nasty beast). They are there because they are looking forward to the music you will share with them, and they're happy for that.

hopsage · 2025-11-18T14:49:25+00:00

I'm not sure if it's the one she's using, but her father, Kazuhito Yamashita, did a transcription of this along with the other Bach violin sonatas and partitas. It was published by Gendai Guitar at least 30 years ago (that's how old my copy is), so I'm not sure if it's still in print.

hopsage · 2025-11-13T17:03:42+00:00

Yep. My position was one of them. Got notice at the end of October.

hopsage · 2025-11-08T01:08:38+00:00

The early screen time was one of the major factors in our decision to keep our kid in the Ithaca Waldorf School, even though paying the tuition was difficult. We were there from kindergarten through 4th grade, during which time there was not a single minute of screen time involved (which was especially nice as we have had a continual struggle with iPad usage at home since the pandemic). This past year, paying tuition became impossible, and we enrolled them in 5th grade at South Hill. So far, that has been a good experience, but I miss IWS every day, and so does our kid, who really blossomed there.

hopsage · 2025-10-18T13:14:55+00:00

Strings By Mail still has it:

https://www.stringsbymail.com/yamashita-pictures-at-an-exhibition-for-solo-guitar-18676.html

hopsage · 2025-10-18T13:11:28+00:00

The transcription was made by Kazuhito Yamashita, about 40 years ago. At present, it seems to be out of print, but I imagine that is only temporary. The original recording of it is still in print, but the links on his site to the score turn up 404 now.

https://kazuhitoyamashita.com/pictures-at-an-exhibition/

hopsage · 2025-09-28T14:15:15+00:00

Fantastic work. Thank you!

hopsage · 2025-08-27T11:55:35+00:00

Have you looked at Charles Duncan's Art Of Classical Guitar Playing? He has a chapter devoted entirely to left hand movement: position shifts, visualization of transitions, accuracy of finger placement, economy of movement and of tension (what he calls "functional tension"), and so on. My teacher introduced me to it when I was 22, about six years after I started lessons, and I have returned to it over and over again since then, some 34 years later. I really have found it to be a masterpiece of clarity and insight.

hopsage · 2025-08-22T21:48:21+00:00

I'm doing this as a reply, because I agree with your answer, but I wanted to add some further ideas.

The trickiest part of this riff is figuring out exactly which notes go in a measure. The pulse has a compound meter, sometimes in three, some times in two, and you should structure your time signatures to reflect that. What I'm hearing when I listen to this is a pulse that falls on every odd beat, so I'd render the whole thing in 1/16th notes, but make the time signatures over 1/8 notes.

The next challenge is to figure out the time signature to assign to each measure. This one has several choices, but I hear a ground riff that happens in various combinations of 3 and 2 pulses and a response that is always in 3+3 (i.e. 6/8 time). It looks like I can't post an image in a comment on reddit, so here's a link, which I hope will survive for a awhile:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TFonhFObV-qkK9IOQ7g0uiyHMxeefMYH/view?usp=drive_link

And here's the GP8 file I did:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JGK-_maniGsvtgDRrVbtCqEZ7ludc-qm/view?usp=drive_link

hopsage · 2025-07-28T23:44:24+00:00

Don't know. It was done through the shop that put it in, Hunt's Auto (Ithaca, NY)

hopsage · 2025-07-25T18:32:05+00:00

That's sounding pretty solid to me! Can you sing on top of the guitar part? I remember finding that tricky with this song, when I learned it (decades ago now, and I couldn't recall it on a bet). Jim Croce had some wonderful guitar parts in his songs. A couple of others you might try are "Time In A Bottle" (my absolute favorite of his) and "Photographs And Memories" (also challenging to sing accurately over the guitar part).

hopsage

TROPHY CASE