General Hints and Suggestions
Your practice environment should be free of distractions. Schedule a consistent time to practice that will not make you feel rushed. Relax and have fun! The curriculum for all LAGA Online programs moves sequentially in incremental steps. Your progress will depend on your understanding and mastery of the previous lessons. Keep in mind that you are building habits that have both physical and mental aspects. Grasping a new concept is different than physically internalizing it. Please give yourself time to acquire the particular skill whether it is a new technique, a chord change or sight-reading skills.
Take your time with each lesson. Don’t move on to the next step until you can perform with a sense of ease and confidence. If you are making too many errors or experiencing difficulty, you may have chosen a tempo that is too fast, or have started a new lesson before mastering the previous skills. The solution to both problems is straightforward. First, take your time and practice slowly. Second, stay diligent with each drill/piece until it feels second-nature. If you come across a unit or a piece where you experience an unusual amount of technical difficulty, revisit the previous levels in order to work on the proper techniques.
Both building new habits and correcting old habits requires time and repetition. Think about it as choreography for your hands.
Always be mindful of the rhythm structure of the piece or study, even if your initial practice tempo is slower.
Technical Hints
Beware of excess tension during practice. Your whole body, especially your hands, needs to be in a dynamic yet relaxed state. In order to avoid physical injuries such as RSI (repetitive strain injury), tendonitis and focal dystonia, please make sure you warm up properly before each practice session using the routine in the first unit and pay special attention to the hand and finger positions in the videos.
Practicing in front of a mirror is a great way to increase your technical awareness. Visual and kinesthetic factors are equally important to learning an instrument.
The traditional method of developing technique while learning to read music is a very limited approach. The learning curve can be steep. In order to complement this method, we incorporate a rote learning approach. This teaching method has been the main method of transmission for musical traditions around the world including traditional flamenco guitar, as well as folk music from Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia. After rote-learning a piece, you can switch to the “reverse kinesthetic” approach, which involves studying the score of a piece that has already been learned. In this way, you can immediately connect your playing experience with note reading.
Rhythm and Tempo
Establish the rhythm of the piece by tapping (using your hand or foot) at a slower tempo. The tempo of a musically performed classical piece will (and should) vary throughout, based on the interpretation of the musician. In order to reach that final level, however, we suggest beginners start practicing along with a metronome to develop a solid sense of a downbeat, and eventually, discontinue the use of the metronome in order to begin working on a more musical performance using proper rallentandos and rubato. Keep in mind, the ultimate goal is a musical performance – not a metronomic, robotic performance. But using ‘musicality’ as a disguise for poor understanding and/or performance of rhythm should be avoided.
Play-along Clips (Level 1 only)
These videos are provided as a bonus for those students who wish to practice along with an accompaniment. They are optional material for our students who wish to experience playing in a classical ensemble. Needless to say, a duo, trio, or any ensemble performance in classical music is performed in-person, and relies on rhythmic and emphatic cues of a conductor or lead performer. For beginners, however, it is useful to have the downbeats cued in before starting the piece. Keep in mind that the downbeats do not necessarily reflect the actual rhythmic structure of the given piece. Study the rhythm of the piece carefully on the sheet music as you watch your instructor’s performance to internalize the rhythm and the meter before working with these accompaniment clips.
Tuning
Whether you are a beginner or an advanced player, you will want to make sure that your guitar is tuned up before practicing or performing. Using an electronic tuner is becoming a common solution nowadays, and it can be useful in a pinch. However, the traditional way of tuning (using our ears, rather than eyes) is undoubtedly a better way to develop your musicianship. Over time, you will not only be able to tune your guitar in a much shorter period of time but also develop your hearing.
Beginner level: Simply click on the audio clips below to tune each of your strings, one at a time. As you carefully listen to the pitch, rotate the tuning peg of the corresponding string counterclockwise (higher in pitch) or clockwise (lower in pitch) to match the exact note.
Intermediate-advanced: Once you develop a good understanding of how the strings are related and how the tuning pegs work, you can start tuning the strings relatively: You will still need a reference pitch to begin tuning your guitar. Most guitarists choose the first string (E) for this. Click on the first clip below to tune your first string, then tune the rest of the strings relatively, using the default methodology (open string pitch equivalence) outlined in Level 2, Unit 2.
Sight-reading
Sight-reading can be one of the most arduous phases of learning a new instrument. Many guitar students get frustrated and give up at this stage. Over the years, students who have used this curriculum have been able to master the notes on the guitar while building a solid technique. Our curriculum is developed based on two highly effective learning methods: anchoring and graduated interval repetition. The method of anchoring accelerates the note learning process by associating interval drills and several core folk melodies to each string. Graduated interval repetition method optimizes the learning process by increasing the time intervals between reminders once a new note has been introduced.
Sheet Music
LAGA Classical provides a systematic approach that guides students through a methodical progression and gradually reinforces the student’s ability to internalize the structure of the fingerboard. Therefore, fingering notation is given only in the initial units. Fingering notations on sheet music can be limiting – reducing the number of possibilities on the fingerboard to one. They also limit the student’s progress in developing connections between the visual and kinesthetic, and between the visual and aural on the fingerboard. Furthermore, they limit the student’s sight-reading progress by forcing them to rely upon string, finger, position numbers.
The video clips provide a technical model, and act as a guide on subtle technical and musical issues. Yet students are encouraged to explore the fingerboard themselves and gradually improve their skill to maneuver and transition to countless fingering possibilities. Mastering the fingerboard is an important part of your development as a guitarist. It will pay big dividends when you progress to advanced levels. Thus, if you are having difficulty determining the default positions of a given note in the context of the surrounding phrase and texture, you will find it useful to return to an earlier level where you will be able to determine the default positions easily. Then you can gradually develop this skill in preparation to upcoming advanced units.
Additional Hints
The curriculum is designed to gradually move you up in level one step at a time. In general, if a given piece is taking an inordinate amount of time to learn, you may have skipped a lesson/unit that covers a specific concept or technique that you may have to review further. The key is to find this point in the curriculum. An easy solution to this problem is to follow the curriculum in order, paying special attention to the pieces or drills that you may have to focus on further.
If you have a question about a particular lesson or a concept, please do not hesitate to contact us via the lesson feedback form located on each of the lesson pages below the video. For general questions, please use the Contact form on your Student Homepage.