Classical Guitar For Dummies
By Jon Chappell Mark PhillipsJohn Wiley & Sons
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-46470-0
Chapter One
An Acoustic Guitar in a League of Its Own In This Chapter
* Defining the term classical guitar
* Surveying the classical guitar's history in music
* Breaking down the classical guitar's parts
* Noting the differences between a classical guitar and other guitar types
In the right hands, the classical guitar can produce some of the most beautiful sounds in all of music. With it, a skilled performer can create miniature moments of intimate tenderness or stirring sagas of grandeur and passion. One reason the classical guitar is capable of such wide-ranging textures and emotions is that it's one of the few stringed instruments that can play chords and single notes with equal ease. And many people credit its special emotive powers to the fact that the performer uses both hands to touch the strings directly to make a sound, allowing him to coax out the softest melody or to vigorously ring out triumphant, full-voiced chords. The tonal variations you can achieve on a guitar played in the classical way rival the colors of the entire symphony orchestra. Even the great Beethoven agreed, calling the guitar "a miniature orchestra in itself."
In this chapter, we start off with the very basics, explaining the two different connotations associated with classical guitar to give you a solid understanding of what you're reading about in the first place. (Many people may not realize that simply playing a classical piece on a guitar doesn't necessarily qualify as classical guitar!) We then conduct a side-by-side comparison of the classical guitar and its traditional acoustic counterpart, exploring their differences in physique as well as in technique and musical requirements. Finally, we expound on the allure of this lesser-known stringed instrument to whet your appetite for what's in store.
Classical Guitar: One Term, Two Meanings, and a Bit of History
The first thing you have to sort out is just what's meant by the term classical guitar. It can describe both a type of instrument and a style of music played on that instrument. When referring to the instrument itself, you're talking about a guitar that has a particular design and construction, is made of certain materials, and requires playing techniques that are unique to this type of guitar, as compared to other guitars. To mine the depths of all the tonal and textural richness that await you in the world of classical guitar music, you must employ those specific right- and left-hand techniques, which together comprise the classical guitar style.
In this book we focus exclusively on the techniques that get you playing the classical guitar style - using a nylon-string classical guitar and stroking the strings with your right-hand fingers. Doing this empowers you to play the music written by the great classical composers throughout history and follow in the footsteps of concert-level virtuosos who for centuries have brought this music to guitar-loving listeners in the same way Vladimir Horowitz did with the piano and Itzhak Perlman did with the violin. The guitar has its own Perlmans and Horowitzes, and you can read about them in Chapter 17.
The guitar as we know it is a relatively young instrument, having evolved to its present form in the 19th century. As such, it doesn't have the rich body of music available for it that, say, the violin does, which has been around for more than 500 years. But the classical guitar has been, how shall we say, industrious in the way it has "borrowed" music from other instruments to claim as its own. As a result, studying classical guitar means that in addition to playing music written for the guitar, you play a lot of music that wasn't written for the guitar in the first place, nor written by a composer who would recognize the instrument you hold in your hands. But that's just part of the adventure of being a guitarist; you have to be somewhat of a pioneer with your instrument.
Nevertheless, nowadays composers write for the instrument all the time, ensuring its continued place in the field of serious musical instrument study. Many guitarists, associations, and organizations commission well-known composers to write compositions for the guitar in the same way that wealthy benefactors commissioned Beethoven and Mozart to write symphonies and sonatas.
TECHNICAL STUFF
Some well-known composers from the 20th century who've written for the guitar include Heitor Villa-Lobos, Luciano Berio, Benjamin Britten, Elliott Carter, Peter Maxwell Davies, William Walton, Alberto Ginestera, stor Piazzolla, and Leo Brouwer. If you think of the classical guitar as playing just the work of the great masters or having an undeniably "Spanish sound," check out what modern musical thinkers are cooking up for the classical guitar all the time.
After taking a while to come into its own historically, the classical guitar is now a permanent member of the classical music community. Classical guitar is taught in universities and conservatories, it's a frequent program entry for concert and recital halls, and it's found readily in new recordings by major classical music record companies. As far as music for the guitar goes, however, it's definitely in the minority, at least in terms of music that gets heard by the public at large - with rock and pop being the major players in this arena.
What a Classical Guitar Looks Like
Viewed from the front, or facing the instrument in its standing up position, the classical guitar body has an upper section, or bulge, where the wood curves outward; a lower section; and an inward curve in the middle separating the upper and lower parts.
The purpose of the guitar's body is to amplify the sound that the vibrating strings make. So the guitar's back and sides are made of stiff, hard wood that reflects, or bounces, the sound off its surface and through the top of the guitar and the sound hole. The traditional wood for the back and sides is rosewood, though lower-priced guitars sometimes use mahogany or maple. For the top, a different wood from the back and sides is used because the top's function is to vibrate freely with the notes that the plucked strings produce. So the wood for the top is softer and more resonant - spruce and cedar are the two most common top woods.
They say a picture's worth a thousand words, so we present a picture of a classical guitar, which allows us to use a lot fewer words than a thousand to describe its various parts and functions. Figure 1-1 shows an illustration of a classical guitar with its main parts labeled. The bulleted list after Figure 1-1 is a corresponding list of those labeled parts with their definitions and brief descriptions of their functions.
Here's a list of the classical guitar's parts:
- Back: The flat part of the guitar body, parallel to and opposite the soundboard, closest to the performer.
- Body: The "box" or sound chamber of the guitar, which acts as a resonator or amplifier for the vibrating strings. The body is also what gives the guitar its particular - and beautiful - tone.
- Bridge: A thin, rectangular piece of flat wood that's glued to the top of the guitar and secures the strings at the body. The bridge transfers the sound from the vibrating strings to the guitar's body. Sitting in a slot of the bridge is the saddle.
- Fingerboard: Also called the fretboard, this is a thin, flat plank of wood glued to the neck and divided into frets. The fingerboard is usually made of ebony, a dense, dark, and hard wood that provides a smooth feel underneath the left-hand fingers as they move up and down and across the neck. Some fingerboards are made of rosewood.
- Frets: Thin metal wires on the fingerboard that run perpendicular to the strings. Pressing down a finger behind one of these shortens the vibrating length of the string, changing its pitch. Note: When used in left-hand fingering discussions, fret refers to the space below the actual fret wire.
- Head or headstock: The slotted section at the top of the neck beyond the nut that holds the tuning machines, where the strings fasten.
- Lower bout: The large, outwardly curved section of the body that surrounds the bridge.
- Neck: The long, semicircular piece of wood jutting out from the body, with a head on one end and strings stretching the full length and beyond. Usually made of mahogany, maple, or other hard woods, the neck's light weight and grain strength enable it to hold its shape while under the considerable tension produced by the taut strings drawn up to pitch.
- Neck heel, heel: The outward-sticking part of the neck that joins the neck to the sides and back of the body.
- Nut: A synthetic (formerly ivory or bone) strip of material that sits between the fingerboard and the headstock. Grooves cut into the nut hold the strings in place as they pass through the nut on their way to the tuning machines.
- Rollers: The white plastic cylinders inside the slots in the head that go perpendicular to the strings and that create a spool for the strings to wrap around as they're wound up or down to pitch. The rollers rotate by means of the tuning pegs.
- Rosette: The decorative ring around the sound hole, usually made of marquetry - inlaid bits of colored wood and other materials (such as mother-of-pearl) arranged in a mosaic-like pattern.
- Saddle: A synthetic (formerly ivory or bone) strip of material that sits in a slot in the bridge. The strings rest on top of the saddle, pressing down on it before passing through the bridge holes, where they're tied off (or otherwise anchored).
- Sides: The narrow, curved wooden pieces between the top and back of the guitar. The sides are made of the same wood as the back and serve to hold together the top and back and to help reflect sound out of the body and through the top.
- Slots: On a classical guitar, the long, oval-shaped holes in the head that expose the rollers and allow the strings to pass through the surface of the head to reach the rollers.
- Sound hole: The circular opening in the soundboard, directly underneath the strings in the upper bout. The sound hole helps to project the sound, but it isn't the exclusive source of sound emanating from the guitar.
- Soundboard or Top: Also referred to as the table, the top is the flat, lighter-colored wood on the body that faces the listener. Its function isn't to remain rigid and reflect sound but to resonate (vibrate) with the strings, amplifying them and projecting the sound in the process.
- Strings: The strings are what the guitarist touches (fretting with the left hand, plucking with the right) to make sound. The six strings travel the length of the neck from the head, where they're wrapped around the tuning machines' rollers to beyond the fingerboard, where they're tied off at the bridge. The top three, or treble, strings are solid nylon. The bottom three, or bass, strings have a nylon core and are surrounded by a metal wrap. (All six strings are referred to as nylon strings, even though the bottom three have an outward metal material.) Strings are available at different prices (usually determined by quality) and are categorized by the degree of tension (such as high and medium).
- Tuning machines: The metal hardware system of gears, shafts, and tuning pegs used to wind the strings to different tensions to get them in tune.
- Tuning pegs: The handles or buttons of the tuning machines that guitarists grip with their fingers to allow them to tune the strings by tightening or loosening them.
- Upper bout: The large, outwardly curved section of the body that surrounds the sound hole and the upper frets of the fingerboard.
- Waist: The narrow, inwardly curved part of the body between the upper bout and the lower bout.
How a Classical Guitar Is Physically Different from Its Peers
A classical guitar is like every other guitar in overall physique. And like other types of acoustic guitars, the classical guitar produces its sound, well, acoustically - that is, without the aid of amplification - unlike the Stratocaster of Jimi Hendrix, which must be played through a guitar amplifier (though it is possible to amplify the acoustic sound of a classical guitar with a microphone).
REMEMBER
But watch out when you hear the term acoustic guitar. A classical guitar produces its sound without amplification, so all classical guitars are in a sense acoustic guitars. But not all acoustics are classical.
Sometimes the best way to know what something is and what makes it special is to know what it isn't. Check out Figure 1-2, which shows a classical guitar alongside a popular traditional acoustic model. Then read through the following list, which sums up some of the major differences between them:
- A classical guitar uses nylon strings. All other acoustics used for unplugged purposes are built for steel strings. And you can't just swap out a set of nylons in your steel string and start playing Bach. The parts that connect the strings to the guitar are built differently, and you'd have a tough time securing a nylon string onto a steel-string guitar. Nylon strings have a gentler sound that suits classical guitar music better than the steel variety.
Some people use the adjective folk to mean any unamplified guitar, so it's always a good idea to clarify whether they mean the nylon-string (classical) or steel-string variety - assuming they're aware of the difference. The guitars played by James Taylor, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Dave Matthews, and Sheryl Crow are all steel-string acoustics, though some folk, pop, and jazz musicians do play their brand of music on a classical guitar, including jazz guitarist Earl Klugh and, somewhat improbably, country music legend Willie Nelson.
TECHNICAL STUFF
Though the instrument is officially known as a classical guitar, other nicknames have sprung up that have come to refer to the "instrument played by classical guitarists." Some of these names include nylon-string guitar, Spanish guitar, and gut-string guitar.
- A classical guitar has only one body size. Acoustic guitar bodies vary widely with regard to size and shape, with names like jumbo, dreadnought, orchestra model, and grand auditorium to help you keep track of them all. It's much easier with classical guitars - they're all the same size and they all feel exactly alike when you hold them. So anything you learn on one classical guitar will transfer over to any other without a major adjustment.
- A classical guitar has no cutaway. Many acoustic guitars have a scoop on the treble (toward the skinny, higher-pitched strings) side of the upper bout that allows upper-fret access for the left hand. On a classical guitar, the body is symmetrical.
- A classical guitar neck is wider than the necks on most steel strings and joins the body at the 12th fret. Steel-string necks are skinnier to facilitate strumming with a pick, and most modern-style steel-string necks join the body at the 14th fret. The wider frets of the classical guitar accommodate playing with the right-hand fingers, and tradition dictates the 12-fret union of neck and body (although some classical guitarists lament the more limited range of a 12-fret neck).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Classical Guitar For Dummiesby Jon Chappell Mark Phillips Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
