Lesson of the Week for Classical Guitar Practicing Arpeggio Patterns on Open Strings The three main benefits of this are: 1. Increased Right Hand Accuracy, 2. Creation of a compact hand position, and 3. Reminding the thumb to play in front…
A Lesson on Muting Strings During Cross-String Trills – In this lesson I cover the difference in technique and sound between single-string trills and cross-string trills as well as the resulting pitch and harmonic intervals. Not muting your cross-string trills…
Video Lesson of the Week – Right hand thumb position and exercises for classical guitar. Here’s the Youtube Video Link if you’d like to watch it there. I also cover a left hand exercise near the end of the video.…
Nice article on practicing slowly with some great pros and cons via this article from The Strad . Although this is a simple piece of advice, on a more broad scale the more guitarists listen to the advice of the…
A full video lesson tutorial for Prelude No. 4 by Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) for classical guitar. I go through the four main sections, discussing the piece and demonstrating. This is a great piece for both pros and students. In particular, I like…
Lesson of the week: “The Spider” Left Hand Finger Independence and Stretch Exercise. This exercise comes from one of the most popular books for the classical guitar: Pumping Nylon by American guitarist Scott Tennant. It’s a great reference/exercise book with short memorable…
This is from my Lesson of the Week segment of the site. A lesson on shifts and string noise for classical guitar using Ricardo Iznaola’s Kitharologus: The Path to Virtuosity (Amazon). This is exercise No. 37 in level 3. I’d put…
Belorussian guitarist Tatyana Ryzhkova gives a nice lesson on melodic work, tremolo, and other warm-up exercises. This comes via her popular YouTube Channel. I haven’t been posting her lesson videos but this one is nice because the student can see more…
Lesson of the week: Left Hand Finger Independence. This exercise comes from one of the most popular books for the classical guitar: Pumping Nylon by American guitarist Scott Tennant. It’s a great reference/exercise book with short memorable exercises for warm ups or…
A full video lesson tutorial for Etude No. 1 by Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) for classical guitar. I go through 4 main ideas, the right hand fingering, left hand fingering, how to navigate from chord to chord, and differences between editions.…
Lesson of the Week: The importance of a well-rounded technique and how m, a scales can improve arpeggios and tremolo If you’ve had troubles improving your arpeggios or tremolo and specific exercises don’t seem to work then you might want…
This is from my Lesson of the Week segment of the site. The idea of Extension and Contraction is so common for the left hand but rarely practiced in the right hand. I’m using Exercise 21 from Ricardo Iznaola’s Kitharologus:…