Started to work on materials for grade 7, which apparently involves actually understanding the music rather than just learning the notes, so all the music theory may be useful after all.
This month, the classical guitar corner academy set a challenge: take a prescribed section of one of the pieces of the grade repertoire, and work on it for a month. Make one video a week to document progress and get feedback. My piece is the last 6 measures of Bach’s Allemande, BWV 996. After some discussion about voices, etc. my GT suggested making a video to demo what I was trying to achieve for this week’s video. I briefly thought about doing this via musescore.com, but rapidly ditched that idea because I haven’t yet figured out how to put several voices on one staff in musescore. So back to technology I can handle. As sleep was a faithless friend this morning I got up at some ridiculously early hour to put the pieces together. How? First I marked up a copy of the music with highlighters to isolate the voices/repeating motifs. Then I used my iphone to take pictures of each measure. These came out pretty dim, so I edited them with photoshop, then dragged them into my favorite video editor ( movavi). Then it was merely a matter of recording the section on the iPhone using the twisted wave app, exporting the .wav file to movavi and lining things up. OK I accidentally chopped off a bit of the music, my lining up is a bit approximate, and I’m still working on the playing aspect, but for a couple hours work it didn't turn out that badly... hopefully with a week’s practice next week’s video will be more polished!
Edit: so we are a couple of weeks on, and I thought it would be interesting to post progress. In the meantime, I've been reading " The practice of practice" book by Jonathan Harnum. One of the things he talks about in the early chapters is how music practice can incorporate many other things apart from sitting down with your guitar and playing - including listening to others play the piece. I'm always fascinated by how my listening changes as I get to know a piece, and although I had listened to a number of versions of the Allemande before starting to learn it, going back and listening again was illuminating now that I can think about other things apart from just playing the notes. Where exactly should the crescendos (and decrescendos) fall? Which voices or notes should be brought out? How much rubato? The 2 versions I listen to most on YT are Matthias Lang and Classicalguitar2. The first is a virtuosic rendition, encompassing superb phrasing, perfectly controlled dynamics and speed with considerable rubato. The second to my ears has less fire and excitement, but with its slower more nuanced approach suits me better. Both bring out a part of the melody I hadn't noticed before, so the current challenge is to incorporate that. Regardless, I'm going to keep working on it and listen again for what pops out in another couple of weeks, but here is where it is now.
Final update: a little late on this, but more to come in the next post. This is where it went after another 2 weeks - still slow, but a bit more fluid.
https://youtu.be/s3EMRysFfOg
