Tag: practice

So what’s your favourite tone colour then?

Nicole NealLeave a comment
Lumiere Grand Colour Palette by Ben Nye.
Colour palette – not just the preserve of the painter eh? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Or thinking about tone colour when approaching a new classical guitar piece for the first time

Following on from a recent post (https://classicalguitarnstuff.com/2012/07/14/approaching-a-new-classical-guitar-piece-for-the-first-time/), I received comments that folks would like some more of my thoughts on learning a new piece for the very first time. And who am I not to oblige!

So today I thought I’d focus on chosing and using tone colour to aid your learning and understanding of a piece.

Firstly, what do we mean by tone colour?
The tone colour (or timbre) refers to the quality or nature of the tone – round, full, rich and fruity which one may use to describe a molto tasto sound (playing close to or over the fretboard). Thin, metallic and zingy which one may use to describe a molto ponticello sound (playing way back next to the bridge of the guitar). The classical guitar actually has a bountiful variety of tone colours or timbres and there are a myriad of tone colours produced in between these two examples, as there are between red and violet in the colours of the rainbow.

Okay now we’ve got that sorted.

How do we figure out how we want to use tone in the new piece?

Well, the first indicator might be the title of the piece. OK, that’s not going to help you if it’s something like “Study No.12”, but if you’ve got a dance like a gigue, something named after a place (Mallorca) or something named as directly as The Sorrow of the Lady of the Wood (Houghton) that can help give you a good starting point to think about the general mood and tone colour for the piece.

The second indicator, if exists, is the musical direction at the start of the piece. This usually gives a very good indication as to the composer’s intention for the general feeling of the piece, or at least its first section. Is it sprightly and bright, for example? If so, what kind of tone colour would help convey that from the outset? Should you use that tone colour throughout? Where should you change it?

Then you might want to go on and think about some other questions:

  • What the dynamic markings are within the piece and what do they indicate?
  • What kind of tone colour would help convey that and, again, where should you change it?
  • Are there repeated sections or reuse of same or similar themes?
  • If so, could the tone colours be treated differently or the same?

On playing the piece through a couple of times does anything leap out at you or lend itself to a particular feeling or colour? Have a play around and see if different tones produce distinctive or unexpected effects.

At this point it is worth remembering that we can also produce varying tones colours with our left hand. It is possible to play the same note in a number of locations around the fretboard and each of these notes, including those played on the open strings, has its own unique nuances in tone colour. Explore where you get the best balance for you between playability, movement and flow in the musical phrases and the differing tones produced by the same notes in different locations around the fretboard.

Have fun colouring in!

Approaching a new classical guitar piece for the first time

Nicole Neal7 Comments
A six-part fugue from The Musical Offering, in...
JS Bach Fugue. What a dude. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is a topic I’ve had lined up for a couple of weeks now and it has serendipitously coincided with myself starting work on a new piece this week.

So, I thought I’d share with you some thoughts on cracking into a new piece for the very first time.

What’s the score?

Be discerning with the edition of sheet music you use. I reaffirmed this to myself only this week (as my Twitter followers will know!) that just because a particular edition of a score has been published doesn’t necessarily mean it has been thoroughly proofread, well-edited or is in fact realistically and musically playable. In the example I had this week there were just some ridiculous fingerings applied, very basic editorial oversights and slightly bizarre sounding chord arrangements. So, do your homework, check around and ask others about good editions to use.

If you’re playing a piece from a graded examination list then they will usually recommend a good edition to use. It certainly does no harm, however, to explore what else is out there though.

You might be interested in how your version compares to an urtext edition (i.e. original score), especially so if the piece is a transcription from another instrument, such as violin or cello perhaps for Bach, or piano for Albeniz and Granados.

Listen up!

One of the things that I do when first adding a new piece to my repertoire is listen to a number of recordings of the same piece by different guitarists. I also think there’s excellent value in listening to the same piece in its original instrumentation if it has been transcribed for guitar, and other instrumentation too for an alternative perspective. This is super easy and cheap to do these days with legions of freely available videos on YouTube. Yay YouTube! OK, there’s some questionable material on there, but there are also a lot of great contributions from very talented amateur and professional musicians alike.

Listening to various interpretations of the same piece can first of all help you pick out certain nuances which may not be immediately clear – maybe it pricks your ears up in a “ooh I like how she plays that bit” kind of way. Secondly, it can help feed some ideas into your own eventual interpretation of the music. It’s all good fuel for the fire.

Once you’ve listened to those alternate interpretations and you’ve started on really learning the piece, I’d be wary of listening too intently to recorded versions. Well, that’s what I do anyway. I think you have to let all that visual and aural information you’ve collected just percolate through you and coalesce, helping form your own unique approach.

What else should I think about?

OK, now you’ve taken a good look at the score, listened to innumerable recordings and watched oodles of YouTube clips, some questions to ponder on when you’re approaching the piece are:

  • What is the style of the piece? Does it have a particular theme or mood in mind? Is it a kind of dance form?
  • Where is the melody? Where is the harmony? How do they relate to one another?
  • Are the bits that you think are harmony bits really harmony bits or are they also melody?
  • How do you want to play it – tone and shape?
  • What’s your end goal for the piece? How do you want it to sound?

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Podcast

Before I forget, I have another podcast for you:Practice and Perception – Do you hear what I hear?

I’ll stick this one over on the podcast page too.