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On Fri, 2 Feb 2007, Jonathan King wrote:
On 2/2/07, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
So on the 2-hour DVD he shows how he plays four songs and he includes a
PDF file with his transcriptions of those songs with both ordinary
musical notation and tab. It isn't classical guitar notation though -
no left or right hand fingerings are given explicitly, but I guess the
tab mostly takes care of that problem and the video also fills in the
blanks. The PDF looks really nice and clean.
Would you need right hand fingerings for most of this stuff? Left hand
wouldn't hurt, though. My guess is that it was/is easy to get the
transcriptions down with "normal" music software but the finger stuff
would then be kind of a pain.
Usually the right hand fingering is understood, or there are a couple of
easy choices, so it usually isn't given in classical guitar transcriptions
except in an occasional tricky spot. With the DVD, which is really
*great* by the way, you get a split screen view of left and right hands
and he explains every technique and trick in detail. The DVD is an
amazing piece of work because it allows you to either watch his hands
(split screen) or see the music itself with the part played being
highlighted -- this is accomplished using two "angles" on the DVD (a
concept I was not familiar with). You can choose two videos (angles) for
the same audio. Edgar Cruz, it turns out, is a fantastic teacher and he
really goes into a lot of depth on how he thinks, how he made decisions
about his arrangements, how one must make tradeoffs of various kinds when
transcribing for guitar, etc. He's a really smart guy. I couldn't be
happier with the DVD. I might even go over it with my son, who is a
beginner, because Cruz brings up so many key issues in how the guitar is
played and how music is arranged. So you can learn a lot from it even if
you don't play the guitar (but you probably wouldn't want to).
"There are more than 400 solo guitar arrangements in my repertoire
which consist of popular requests and personal favorites. My dream is
to see the guitar literature grow to the proportions that piano music
has and I would like to contribute personally to this expansion."
That is a great plan, but there are two problems: (1) it is *way*
harder to write a good chord-melody arrangement for guitar than for
piano, and (2) it is *way* harder to play the chord-melody on solo
guitar than on piano. Way, way, way harder. So a beginning piano
student can learn a piano arrangement that would challenge any
professional guitarist.
Yeah. I remember like two years ago when my son was playing a cute
little cut-down version of "The Young Prince and the Young Princess" by
Rimsky-Korsakov that I thought would sound really cool on guitar. And,
I'm sure it would, but despite the fact that it was basically block
chords on the left hand and a melody on the right, it was ludicrously
hard to play solo.
So I just looked it up and found it here:
http://www.8notes.com/scores/2915.asp?ftype=gif
I can see that it is in Eb major (three flats). Coincidentally, at least
two of the Queen pieces arranged for guitar by Cruz were in Cm (3 flats).
As Cruz explains, for guitar you want 4 sharps or fewer, so the Cm pieces
were transposed to Bm (2 sharps). The Rimsky-Korsakov piece could be
transposed to D (2 sharps) or to E (4 sharps), but you don't want to play
it in Eb. Just from looking at it, my first impression is that E will be
the better choice. For one, it's way easier to deal with the sheets
because all you have to do is change the key signature, change accidental
flats to naturals and accidental naturals to sharps.
I'm not saying that it will be easy after that, far from it, but that will
make it a lot easier. If you stay in Eb, forget it!
That said, I would love to see more nice arrangements like these.
They are really fun and sound great.
They are heroic to do, of course. I had a classical guitar teacher for
one year in college (they offered subsidized therefore cheap lessons
from music school students), and for his MFA recital he ended up doing a
lot of transcribed Bach, mostly violin solo stuff, and there were catty
comments from the piano students there about how guitar was obviously
not a great classical instrument...
Their just jealous because they can't take their pianos with them on
vacation. I would call the guitar "a great little instrument." It can
play classical music. It can do a lot for you. It isn't loud (unless you
plug it in) compared to most classical instruments. You definitely can
play very beautiful, expressive music on it. I remember that Beethoven
made a very positive remark about the guitar when he heard it played, but
I can't remember it exactly -- something like "It's like an entire
symphony all in one small instrument" -- I'll look that up.
Mike
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