GUITAR TECHNIQUE TIP OF THE MONTH Your Personal Guitar Lesson
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Should I Listen to Recordings and
Performances of Other Guitarists?
Click here for the fascinating history of "Nipper" (the dog) and "His Master's Voice"
By Douglas Niedt
Copyright Douglas Niedt, All Rights Reserved. This article may be reprinted, but please be
considerate and give credit to Douglas Niedt.
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The short answer is: Of course you should. Learning to play a piece of music involves making
lots of choices. Decisions have to be made about tempo, rhythmic inflections, fingerings,
articulation, tone color, phrasing, and more. Making those decisions requires knowledge and
experience. Why not draw upon the knowledge and experience of master guitarists by
listening to how they play the piece you are learning? Pepe Romero, John Williams, and
Andres Segovia just might know something you don't!
Thinking that you can make all these musical decisions yourself is almost like thinking you
can go through life in general without seeking the advice and opinions of others. Should I
marry her or not? Should I buy that growth stock? Do I really need that heart transplant right
now? If you had important decisions such as these to make, would you make them without
consulting anyone else? Would you only listen to you? Would you follow only your inner
feelings? Would you only follow your intuition, ignoring the rest of the world? No, that would
be shortsighted and potentially dangerous.
Granted, getting incomplete advice about a heart transplant has more dire consequences
than using a bad fingering on a Sor study. But if you want to be a good guitarist, you need
good information. Since we are dealing with sound, the best way to get that information is by
listening to others, especially the masters.
An important caveat is that we must consult more than one source. To make good informed
decisions, we must seek out many different sources for information and viewpoints. We want
to form our opinions and conclusions from a synthesis of our own experience plus several
others' experience and views. So it is in the music field as well. We don't want to listen to just
one CD, one artist's rendering of a piece. Nor should we listen to just one teacher's opinion.
Even if that teacher is a master teacher and you hang on his every word, his is still only one
viewpoint. You need to have more.
“I've Gotta Be Me...I've Gotta Be Me”
I've heard guitarists say, "I don't want to listen to anyone else because I don't want to copy
them. I want to form my own interpretation. I want to play it my way." Well, doing it one's own
way is absolutely the correct goal. But you can still form your own interpretation without
sticking your head in the sand, oblivious to history and life around you. We learn from how
others succeed and even from how they fail. We can listen to others without copying them. In
fact, the more people you listen to, you realize there are many more options than you had
ever imagined as to how to execute any given aspect of a piece.
To paraphrase the great conductor Bruno Walter: We don't listen and study to repeat what
has already been done or to learn rules. We listen and study to free the imagination.
That is a monumentally important concept. Read it again: We listen and study to free the
imagination.
Listening to others is stimulating, freeing, and enlightening especially if we listen to many
guitarists play a piece. In fact, we should listen to as many as we can. When we do that, we
realize they all play very differently.
For example, we may think or have been told the new piece we are working on is a slow
piece. We hear famous guitarist A play it--yes, he does play it slowly. Then we listen to guitar
great B--he plays it much faster. But guitar great C plays it a little slower than famous guitarist
A.
Questions and observations spring up in our mind. Hmmm. I hear that the tempo range of
these three guitarists is 60-80 for a quarter note. I know now that I can play it anywhere in
that range. But I wonder...could I play it a bit slower than 60? What does that sound like? I bet
I could play it faster than 80. I should at least try it. Why not?
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Before listening to these recordings, if you had been told by your teacher or your own wild
guess that 72 was "correct," you would have cut yourself off from a world of other
possibilities, not only in tempo but others as well. For example, dynamics and especially
articulation are often determined or greatly affected by the tempo chosen.
Again, for this type of study to work best, it is important to listen to several recordings or live
renditions of a piece. If you only listen to one, yes you will be in danger of copying that
recording, even unintentionally. The sound gets into your head and you begin hearing it only
that one way, thinking that's the way the piece goes.
This happens frequently when guitar students unconsciously copy the rubato of another
guitarist. They come up with a very distorted rhythmic sense of the piece because they are
unconsciously playing what they hear in their heads from listening to that one guitarist play
the piece.
Listening to or even copying a lot of different guitarists is healthy, because then you are
experimenting with many different sounds, inflections, and colors. The result will be very
different from listening only to guitarist A and basing ALL your musical judgments on what he
or she does.
Much can be learned by listening to recordings and live concerts. For example, when we
listen to other guitarists, we can listen to their phrasing, how they use tone color changes,
dynamics, tempo changes, and rubato. We can listen to the overall tempo of the piece. We
can study their use of vibrato. We can analyze their fingering--for example whether they play
a passage on the first string for a brighter sound or on the third string for a darker or warmer
sound. We can listen for where they shift in a fast scale passage to discern what fingering
they are using.
Listening to other guitarists for their overall sound is also important, especially for the
beginning and intermediate guitarist. Listening to the tone quality of great guitarists helps
cultivate a beautiful tone in one's own playing. If we don't have a clear idea of what a good
sound is, we can hardly expect to develop it in our own playing. I grew up listening to the
sound of Andres Segovia--that voluptuous, beautiful tone quality. That sound remains in my
mind to this day as something to aspire to. I also hear the clarity of John Williams. I hear the
color of Julian Bream. All of them (and many others) meld together in my mind and fingers to
produce the sound of Douglas Niedt.
As Always, Timing Is Everything
Another important aspect to all this is timing. When should one begin to listen to recordings
of a piece on which one is working? That will vary with the individual. In my case, I listen early
on. Sometimes I listen before I begin to actively learn the piece. Other times I begin listening
to recordings of the piece within the first two weeks. Rarely do I wait longer than that. I am
listening not only for the musical aspects others bring to the piece, but also fingerings.
Fingerings are a crucial element in the early stages of learning a new piece. I don't want to
wait too long to explore every possibility I can discover. I have often "stolen" John Williams',
Segovia's, or others' fingerings.
Again, I emphasize that all this listening stimulates more thinking and discovery. I hear things I
had never thought about before. I find more options to consider in almost every aspect of the
piece. Yes, perhaps I will steal an idea from Julian Bream. But that one idea stimulates seven
new ones. It is an inspirational process, not an imitative one.
But for others, it may be best to wait from a few weeks to several months to listen to other
guitarists' renditions of a piece. The argument for waiting is to force the person to depend
totally on their own judgment and experience to learn a new piece. The downside is that once
the piece is firmly set in their fingers and mind, any other version sounds foreign or wrong to
them. They lose the ability, flexibility, and objectivity to realize that another version or another
way of doing something is better than theirs. Or if they do realize it, because their conception
of the piece is so strongly embedded in their fingers and mind, it is difficult to change it to
something different. They tend to resist change or improvement because it is physically and
mentally difficult to make changes, even simple ones such as new fingerings. It's easier for
them to stick with the familiar and how they already play it.
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Deciding when to begin listening to other guitarists can be a difficult decision. Try different
approaches and see what stimulates you the most and fits with your style of learning. If you
find yourself imitating others because that's easier to do than to come up with ideas of your
own, wait longer before listening to others. Just be careful not to wait too long and get into the
rut of, "Well, I've been doing it this way for a while and it's just too much trouble to change."
Learn Faster
The Suzuki method of teaching musical instruments to children is based upon how children
learn their native language. It is sometimes called the Mother Tongue Method. From birth,
children learn words (and how they are used) as they hear them spoken hundreds of times
by others. Shinichi Suzuki, the inventor of the music method, believed children should learn
music the same way they learn their native language. Music itself is a language. It has its own
syntax and grammar. Just as we could not expect to learn our native language without
hearing it, we cannot learn the language of music without listening to it. Suzuki believed
children should begin listening to music at birth. The more the child listens to live music and
recordings, he asserted, the more quickly the child learns. A core part of the method is daily
listening to recordings of the lessons on which they are working.
The Mother Tongue idea can be applied to anyone learning a musical instrument, not just
Suzuki method students. For a beginner or intermediate guitarist, listening to others play a
piece can be an important way to get the piece into their head. By hearing it over and over
they learn "how it goes." As Suzuki discovered, recognizing what the piece sounds like greatly
enhances and speeds up the learning process.
At this stage of listening, there is little analysis of how a particular artist is playing the piece.
Instead, we are hearing the overall picture. We hear what the melody is and we hear the
harmonies and rhythms in total context rather than as fragmented elements we are trying to
"program" into our fingers. We still must laboriously work our way through the piece, learning
a lot of notes and fingerings and taking in a lot of information. That work happens in a very
slow and perhaps disjointed fashion. But because we have been listening to the CD,
suddenly we are able to recognize and hear the sounds and assimilate them into a bigger
picture. Therefore, as we learn, we are already seeing (and hearing) the forest as we are
trudging through and even planting the trees.
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Having the sound of the piece clearly in your inner ear also prevents the practicing of wrong
notes. For example, if you have really internalized what the melody sounds like, if you make a
mistake, your ear will immediately tell you it is wrong. But if you don't really know what the
melody should sound like, you may not recognize incorrect notes when you play them. You
are likely to practice the wrong notes until you are corrected days, perhaps weeks later. Then
you will need to unlearn whole passages and learn them again correctly.
I Want To Learn Something New
Listening to other guitarists is a great way to find new repertoire. Sure, you can rely on your
teacher to feed you new material. He will give you pieces that help your musical and technical
development. But he doesn't know your personal tastes. YOU may not know your personal
tastes. You must listen to lots of repertoire to discover what you like and what you don't like.
Plus, what you don't like at first, you may discover you love later on after listening to more of
it! Listen to recordings and live performances to find pieces you really like. Believe me, if you
choose to learn a piece you really love, you will learn it much faster, spend more time
practicing, and play it far better than a piece you are only lukewarm about.
Enlarge Your Universe
You want to broaden your awareness and musical knowledge as much as possible. If you are
working on the Bouree (or Bourree) from Bach's Lute Suite I (BWV 996), don't just listen to
12 recordings of the Bouree. Be sure to listen to the ENTIRE SUITE to gain a feel for how the
piece fits into the suite as a whole. If you are playing Prelude #4 by Heitor Villa-Lobos, listen
to many recordings of all five preludes by different guitarists, not just Prelude #4.
When the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz began work on a new piece, he not only worked on
that piece, but sight-read through ALL the works of that composer. Those that could not be
played on the piano, he listened to or studied the scores. Talk about looking at the big
picture.
If you are learning a study by Fernando Sor, listen not only to his other studies, but also his
other larger works. When you're done with that, listen to works by Mauro Giuliani, one of
Sor's contemporaries, to hear how his music is similar and different. But don't stop there.
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Some guitarists only listen to guitarists. We also need to listen to other musicians. The
classical guitar is a very very small niche in the world of classical music. If you are playing
Bach, listen to the larger world of baroque music in general. After listening to Sor and
Giuliani, listen to the piano music of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Listen to how Sor's style
of writing is different from theirs, and how Sor fits into the larger scheme of things. You can
also pick up great ideas from pianists on how to use dynamics and especially articulation to
bring an authentic classical style to your playing. Sometimes, studying how other
instrumentalists produce certain effects can inspire you to adapt those techniques to your
guitar playing.
When you follow this approach of looking at the big picture, you learn the language of the era
and therefore can better speak the language of the particular composers whose music you
are learning.
Yes, I Know You Have Excuses
1. You don't have time. You barely have time to practice.
Well, if you make the time to listen to others, you will save far more time learning your music
(see Suzuki above). You will also play much better. Simple as that.
2. You can't afford to buy bunches of CDs.
Try the library. Try used CDs on Amazon.com. They have great deals. I rarely buy new CDs.
Used CDs are just fine and often cost less than $5. And absolutely positively try iTunes. Buy
ten versions of Albeniz's Leyenda (Asturias) for 99 cents each! It doesn't get any better than
that.
One More Thought
Finally, here is one more reason to listen to great artists. It is a reason that goes beyond just
gaining practical ideas on interpretation, sound, and fingering that otherwise might not have
occurred to us. Ask yourself what inspired you to take up the guitar in the first place.
Chances are you began playing the guitar because you heard it played by someone who
touched your heart and soul with their music. They may not even have been a great player.
By listening to others, we gain inspiration. Master artists fuel our desire to work harder and
improve beyond what we thought possible. We gain insights into the capabilities of our
instrument.
We discover that when playing our guitar, there are no limits; only more possibilities. I think
that's fabulous.
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Doug's Guitar Technique Tip of the Month will be sent to you monthly. These are the best on
the Internet. No one else's technique articles and videos even come close. Most of the written
tips run over 20 pages. Most of the videos run from 15-30 minutes. The tips are thorough and
the production is excellent. Check out the free tips in Doug's Vault for a sampling.
A one-year subscription (12 tips) is only $24. That is only $2 per tip.