Calling all Members! Share Your Ideas for Our Next Community Challenge 
Hey everyone,
We hope you all enjoyed our recent "Music YOU Love Challenge" as much as we did! The response was amazing, and we loved seeing all of your favorite music choices.
Now it's time to start thinking about our next community challenge, and we want to hear from you!
The challenge can be anything you like - it could be related to music, or something completely different. It could involve composers, genres, or regions or anything else! We want to hear all of your ideas!
So, what do you think? Do you have an idea for our next community challenge? We can't wait to hear from you! Please post your ideas in this thread!
Thank you all for being part of our community, and we can't wait to see what you come up with!
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Here are a few ideas that come to mind.
1. With March 17th coming up (St Patrick’s Day), maybe a Celtic music challenge? I know St Patrick’s Day isn’t celebrated everywhere, but why not?2. I always enjoy working on sets of etudes. Maybe Brouwer’s Estudios Sencillos, Sor’s Op 60 or 31, or even a repeat of the Assad or Koshkin studies written for TB. Villa-Lobos studies are great, but too difficult perhaps for us non-advanced guitarists.
3. A somewhat neglected era of music is Renaissance. Maybe it’s not everyone’s “cup of tea” but I would think everyone could find something to work on that they like if they look hard enough. Maybe a few pieces at different playing levels could be suggested? Maybe a livestream on where to find tablatures and how to play from them on the guitar?
4. Theme and Variations challenge. Any era.
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Eric Phillips Thank you, Eric. those are great suggestions! I believe Steve Pederson had a similar idea in another thread regarding a folk challenge with St.Patrick's Day coming up!
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Eric Phillips I loved this St. Patrick's day idea! Incidentally, it's my birthday too!
But Renaissance is really great too... -
Eric Phillips I think the Renaissance music would be great! This is very accessible to players at all levels.
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Eric Phillips I like the etudes idea. I'm always interested in hearing people's favorites from different composers and for different skills.
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Moyses Lopes Like the Renaissance idea, especially since players at all levels can participate...
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Eric Phillips good proposals, an Etude Challenge is something really cool and you're right that Renaissance music is kind of underrated.
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Here are a couple of resources that people may be interested in if we go this route...
https://www.scribd.com/read/269690165/Fingerpicking-Irish-Songs
This guy also has a bunch of free resources you can download without signing up:
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Steve Pederson This could be really interesting, couldn't it? We can do some duo versions... It could be fun!
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How about a "Song and Dance" challenge!
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There are so many great songs and dances written or arranged for guitar covering all levels so this could be a great inclusive challenge.
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Ron you're right if we consider any dance like Piazzolla Tangos and the like, as most South American music is dance based... as many others too!
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Blaise Laflamme Yes there's everything from Renaissance/Baroque (like the dances from Terpsichore) through to Takemitsu's transcriptions of the Beatles songs and Roland Dyens Chansons Francaises, so plenty to choose from!
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Maybe musical themes in movies would be interesting...
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Barney Interesting idea... I'm not aware of a any real arrangement of any of them, do you have some references?
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Blaise Laflamme Not off hand, except for Cavatina by Stanley Myers from Deer Hunter. There are probably others, but would have to research...
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Barney oh yeah sure I'm aware of Cavatina... but that'd be great to have some arrangements of popular film themes.
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Barney I thought I had come across some pieces composed for guitar by Ennio Morricone but I have not found any mention of them online, so I must be mistaken. He did have quite a catalog of 'classical' compositions which are pretty interesting, and surprising. I noticed in my search there are a lot of his movie music arranged for guitar (by others) but I haven't listened to any of that yet.
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Jack Stewart You were right about Morricone. It's Quattro Pezzi per Chitarra.
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Jack Stewart Sounds like a good idea which needs some research and discovery. There are probably some nice arrangements by top guitarists of film/popular music scores that work great on classical guitar.
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Noriyasu Takeuchi has arranged a lot of film music (and song) for intermediate level guitarists. These can be found online. (Not sure about copyright issues, though.) A couple of other well-known film themes for guitar are Brouwer's 'Una dia de Noviembre' and various arrangements of Luiz Bonfa's famous song 'Manha da Carnaval'. I seem to recall John Williams having devoted an entire CD to film music arranged for guitar - you might check out the playlist, if it's available somewhere. I believe Takemitsu also wrote some guitar music for film, a trio if I'm not mistaken. And I vaguely recall having once come across something by Shostakovich, believe it or not! (A waltz, if I'm not mistaken, used in some old Soviet film.) There are also arrangements for some of Morricone's 'Spaghetti Western' themes, mostly rather difficult I suspect. I'm sure there must be other film music in the repertoire. (Almost forgot - the famous 'Spanish Romance' was used in the film 'Jeux Interdits'.)
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Barney I believe I know two other great pieces from films: Assad's "Farewell" and Ramirez' "Balada para Martin Fierro". Both of them have been beautifully arranged for solo guitar and are not too difficult to play (comparable in difficulty to "Un Dia de Noviembre" I'd say).
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Steve Price Ah yes, that's it. So I'm not crazy. (well......)
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Eric Phillips Thanks Eric! I will have to give those a listen.
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David Krupka Good suggestions to look at, David. thanks!
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End of the Year Challenge: Finish Strong!
