Tips, Techniques, Examples about my favorite musical instrument, the Twelve-String Guitar.

If you play guitar check out Playing Technique, or Strings / Setup. There are also some interesting posts about guitars at, you guessed it, Guitars.

If you want to spread your musical talents around, you will find some good info at Recording.

Marketing - meh - I'm probably the world's best bad example. Although you could find funny stuff there.

I've made some music videos through the years, and you can find them and other interesting music at Music I Like, Music I Play.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

The Necessary becomes Magic

I've written about the Bach Lute prelude BWV999 before. It is a really nice piece, suitable for beginners yet has depth that suited Segovia and many other masters.
I have been playing it almost every day that I pick up the guitar, often more than once. It is a perfect warm up exercise. In the past, I used it for speed. Lately I play it more slowly, eliciting as nice a plucky tone as one can get from a 12-string.

Today I'd like to concentrate on one of the early difficulties in this piece, measure 15. As you can see below, it requires holding the lowest f while barring the top 3 courses of the 5th fret. This is difficult on a classical guitar, very difficult on a 12-string guitar, and now, for me with arthritis or something in my left hand, almost impossible.


One day a light went on behind my eyes - why not let the octave strings do the work?!

A little work, and I came up with this:


Much easier.

No comments:

Post a Comment