Classical Guitar Blog Roundup

Another good week on the classical guitar blogs. Lots of teaching-centric things.

First up, Bradford Werner of Classical Guitar Canada goes through his week of guitar teaching. The post is about the things Brandford talked about most while teaching this week. Like Bradford, I notice certain trends coming up in teaching from week to week. So you end up talking about a lot of the same stuff over and over, but it’s still fascinating. A lot of times those things are aspects of your own playing that are on your mind and come out in the teaching stuido. I love the idea behind this post. If every classical guitar teacher in the world did a blog post like this once a week, there’d be a lot more great knowledge floating around.

Nick Cutroneo covered some practice games for children in his lastest post in a series about teaching young guitar students. This is particularly fascinating, because most of us are not young children (only in spirit). So these games seem corney, but I would bet every young music student would love them.

Philip Hii wrote an extensive post about rhythm. Why? Because it’s probably the most important aspect of anyone’s playing. Two quotes stand out. “[A]lways play everything in time, all the time,” and, “the best way to test your rhythm and develop good time it is to play with other musicians.”

The Guitar Salon Blog has put up several video interviews with Grisha Goryachev. The third part is linked. It covers Grisha’s development as flamenco guitarist and how/why he got into it when he was growing up.

Two Guitar Videos

Composer Milton Babbit passed away yesterday (Saturday – 1/29/2011). Whether or not you enjoy his music, Babbitt was a major figure in the art music world. His Composition for Guitar follows.

Ever wanted to look inside David Russell’s guitar? Now you can. The video below is a look inside a 1988 John Gilbert guitar build for David Russell.