One of the essential lessons I’ve learned over the years is that instruments in fifths tuning need to be shorter and smaller than regular guitars, because the ring and pinky fingers on the left hand can start aching due to the strain. The instrument group has grown and branched out since its beginning in the 1970s, and today people use several tunings and a variety of string courses. This tuning emerged to let guitarists approach music with the same left-hand fingerings as the fiddlers. I’m referring to performers like Zsófia Boros, who moves in a quiet, intense space where she interprets music by contemporary composers, Derek Gripper from South Africa who connects his classical guitar training to West African kora harp music, or Ralph Towner, whose soft, but complex music I've held dear for many years.ĭuring the early spring of 2018 I gradually conceptualized the idea of a nylon-strung guitar that could connect to my earlier work for guitars tuned to fifths. The expression “nylon string guitar”, for example, may conjure up a series of associations in a guitarist’s mind such as flamenco, Brazilian, or romantic Spanish music. I’ve always had a lot of time for practitioners of this instrument who operate in the cross-section between improvisation and composition, using its potential for discreetly powerful music. When we talk about instruments in the guitar world, we seem to talk about materials and playing techniques in connection to genres or approaches. When the classical guitar is played to my taste, it moves between light and shadows like an elegant thief. I started dreaming about a sound where the dividing lines get softened and mystery is present. A couple of years ago, I found myself tired of hearing the double-course steel strings I’d been playing, and realized I was enjoying listening to the nylon-string, or “classical” guitar more than any other plucked string instrument. I’m a guitarist, and I practice a lot for pleasure and grounding.
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