Once in a while I need a break from playing the guitar. This year I have discovered two possible things to do besides playing music. In July I got my first experiences as an alpinist. I spent a few weeks in altitudes higher than 3500 m and the peak was about 5000 m so I… Continue reading
Post Category → Research & Thoughts
How Popular is the Classical Guitar on the Web?
Often I find myself in conversations where people praise the things that they know about. What do I mean by that? Well, classical guitarists tend to say that everybody knows classical guitar and train conductors say that the security bars at the crossroads are always down. But if you look a bit further than your… Continue reading
The Sources of Information for a Guitar Teacher
A (guitar)teacher should always know more than the students and often this is the case. However, young people crawl around the Web, talk to many people and have opinion on everything. How to beat them? The only way is to keep reading. Education is a life-time process and if you give up, you’ll be in… Continue reading
What Makes a Good Guitar Lesson
The most common way to learn to play the guitar or any other instrument is to get a good teacher and attend lessons. Of course, you should practice on your own between lessons. Lesson is just a short happy occasion when you meet your teacher, get your homework evaluated and what else? Let’s see what… Continue reading
What’s that Funny Instrument? Playing the Guitar in India
The World is round and once in a while I find myself playing the guitar in places where this instrument is not as popular as we know it. Everyone who has read the Tony Palmer’s book about Julian Bream (A Life on the Road) knows what I am talking about 🙂 So we were in… Continue reading
Group Lessons vs Private Lessons When Learning the Guitar
Everyone who’s ever been to a school knows that he or she is not the only student in the classroom. In bad cases you may be one of 40 but if we take an average countryside school here in Estonia, you may be lucky enough to study together with less than 10 classmates. But what… Continue reading
Sources for Developing Guitarist’s Playing Technique
Let’s go on with the guitar playing technique and I was previously talking about an important part of the techique – the playing mechanics. So what is a good material for developing your mechanics? The term “playing mechanics” came prominently to my mind unfortunately when I already had done my BA degree in classical guitar… Continue reading
Which Guitar Method Book Is The Right One For You?
One good opportunity to develop the skills of playing the guitar is learning the guitar from textbook. However there are many textbooks (in Estonian a dozen, but hundreds in English and Russian), and a lot of them are available our stores already. How to choose the right textbook and how many should one person have?… Continue reading
What is a Guitar Playing Technique
As promised before – let’s dig a little deeper into the subject of practicing and this time I’ll express my thoughts about developing guitarists’ playing technique as this is a very important factor in successful guitar playing. Sometimes people say that one or another guitarist (or other instrumentalist or a singer or an athlet) has… Continue reading
The Number of Strings on a Guitar
Every child knows that there are six strings on the guitar. But is it alwasy like this? In fact, there are numerous examples of guitars that have more or even less strings. Sometimes there is a clear reason for that but not always. Let’s clear it up a bit. When I talk about the history… Continue reading