Thoughts on Technique Books: serie Didáctica and Pumping Nylon
Hi everyone, are you familiar with Carlevaro’s Serie Didáctica or Scott Tennant’s pumping nylon? I’m analyze those two books for my pedagogy class. The areas I want to focus on is the difference between those two books teaching(which includes how the books are structured and the info within the book) and how a student may develop different attributes by learning from each book.
it would be greatly appreciated if you are able to share your thoughts on either of the two books. Speculations and guesses are welcome as well. Since it’s my responsibility to verify and research into the info I obtain, anything is welcome as long as it’s without malicious intent :)
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Carlevaro is an exhaustive resource with every possibility notated. Lots of great exercises and considered the bible for technique in a lot of circles. But it is also extremely time consuming to get through every single exercise correctly. Pumping nylon covers a lot of different things quickly and is organized in a very logical way with great descriptions on the techniques. It's easy to use in a lesson and practice session to cover a number of techniques in a warm up. Definitely a great initialization to approach technique practice in an organized way. Once through pumping nylon I really like Ktharologus by Ricardo Iznaola which I use and the Carlevaro in my warmups.
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Anthony DiMambro It would be great to have an updated Iznaola course on TB to accompany the book. I'd benefit from audiovisual guides to the materials and what to focus on while using it.
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EJ Huang To me they are two different things and serve different goals. While pumping Nylon is a great Technique Handbook with exercises that you can almost pick here and there without too much context, the Carlevaro's books of technique on the other hand are tightly coupled with the master book «School of Guitar» where all the fundamentals are exposed in great details. Most of Carlevaro's exercises, if performed without applying the principles of interpretation of his approach, will prove to be of little or no use and perhaps even harmful at worst. But once the principles of his approach have been assimilated, in my opinion, they provide a fluidity and ease of playing that is very natural to the body and close to the musical movement.
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Blaise Laflamme I noticed that there was a forum set up around the Carlevaro technique last year. I wonder if TB could follow up with a formal guide to the text and materials as a product of that discussion?
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David Right, we created a community group around «everything» Carlevaro including «technique». That could be a good idea but knowing that Tonebase is more liberal than specific about school of thinking I doubt they'll be interested in a complete course around it, but they already have some material available from Gaelle Solal and Alfredo Escande.
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