sublimed.be

“It [the electric guitar] is an abomination”

A famous quote once supposedly to have been said by Andrés Segovia. It probably wasn’t clear to Segovia back when he said it, that the Electric Guitar would become a proven musical force. But if we return to his word, abomination, then let me tell you one thing. Segovia is much revered in the world of Classical Guitar, and for one reason: He was a mystic who made playing the guitar seem like an unachieveable height, that would only ever be known by the few. That attitude and practice is the abomination.

Segovia and his transcriptions brought the guitar into more general acceptance as an instrument in its own right, but the positional and finger markings in his music show him to be a mystical time-waster.

I couldn’t even say with accuracy that he definitely played the music like the way he transcribed, but if he did, then he did nothing worthwhile for guitarists and their own struggle to become better players.

The over-complex fingerings, unnecessary slurs and other such markers:- it boils down to one thing: I think Segovia knew that the secret of the guitar was not the complex way one can choose to play it, but the damned simplicity of it -once you’ve built a solid grounding. If you were to try and learn guitar, using Segovia’s transcriptions and his fingerings, then as a beginner a brick wall of complete and utter failure is heading your way.

You can throw away the years trying to emulate the playing style of Segovia, perhaps believing that in doing so you will attain some higher state of playing effortlessly, in a impressively complex manner.

This is a gross, miscalculated assumption. In fact it:

1. Requires many years more work
2. Does not ground any real technique into your playing
3. Has very little reward (no progressive technique)
4. Makes results hard to come by
5. Turns playing the guitar ‘well’ into a whim, on which you’ll have good days and bad ones.

I could go on and on, but the simple fact is that such attitudes are harmful to the enjoyment and satisfaction that many novice players will receive for their efforts.

To counteract such mysticism, and if you have encountered it elsewhere perpetrated by your guitar ‘tutors’ and have struggled with your playing without being able to identify why you are unable to chart your progress, then read on:

Firstly question why you have to play pieces in certain positions and fingering patterns just because they are established by some tradition. Clouding the mind [and the muscles of your body] with nonsensical complexity will waste many hours of practice.

Take your pieces of music, throw away the idiotic patterning, and start over. Learn to play the piece as simply as the notated music allows. Find a suitable position and fingering for the music that does not require any undue complexity and can be played in the simplest manner. This is your key to a solid, grounded technique that will serve you a thousand times more robustly than the mystic’s technique.

The secret of playing classical guitar, which is not commonly told, is that once you have grounded your technique and have learned to play a piece simply, you will naturally begin to look for more personal ways to play the music, choosing different positions, fingerings that suit your level perfectly. Once this starts to happen, the music you play and the manner in which you play it becomes that complex, individual technique you tried to achieve from day one. Do you want to be just another ‘Segovia’ and to struggle to play his way, just because he was a past master? Why – when you can build a foundation of solid technique and develop your own uniqueness?