II. Rhythm // FEB 24th

José Espírito Santo wonderful! Such a great job. Congrats on getting those recorded and thank you for sending them in!

• 2a: Just perfect! Nothing I can say here at all apart from: great job!!! 
• 2b: A little more work needs to be done here - the triplets are characterized by the fact that all three notes must fit within a single beat. Although they look like eighth notes, and it might be tempting to play them as such, it's important to remember they are not eighth notes - they are a different division of the beat altogether. Also make sure not to introduce any rest between the triplet and the chord following it.

Desi (a few comments below you) found a great way around the difficult position change - playing only the top melody, without the chords. That might be a good intermediate step to adopt, just to make sure you have that triplet rhythm perfectly internalized before you add in the chords.

• 2d: Great job overall!! Really interesting thing happened here: in measure 4, on the first beat, you actually played a triplet! That's exactly the formula from exercise 2c that I was talking about above! Super interesting. Apply that in 2c and you will be golden!
• 2f: Perfect! Nothing to say apart from that. Wonderful job! Thanks so much for sending these in, and congratulations on a job really well done! 

José Espírito Santo Awesome! Let me know if you have any questions and hope to see you around future sessions!

Desi Husband very good job here too! I'm not surprised that you decided to also tackle the hardest one, given how well the others went  Quick thoughts:

• the last note in measure 1 was a bit late
• the first note in measure 3 was just a bit long
• the last triplet in measure 3 was a bit slow.

Really good job given how difficult this is, though!

Desi Husband Hi Desi! Sorry, I missed this earlier! It's a bit hard to tell from the angle of the video, but I don't think the angle of your left arm is strange. What I do notice, which might contribute to the pain you are experiencing, are two things:

First thing:

• the palm of your left-hand touches the bottom of your fretboard. This is an extremely common tendency among early-stage classical technique learners. It's probably a result of the tendency to "grip" the fretboard as if you were supporting the weight of the instrument through the left hand.
• Ideally, what we want to do instead is to sit in a position where the fretboard can "exist" at the desired angle by itself, only being held in place by the contact points on our two legs and right arm, but with no help from the left hand. The left hand can then be "added on" to the fretboard, with your fingers (on one side) and thumb (on the other side) acting almost like a pair of tweezers.
• Sometimes, I use a pencil to illustrate this: try playing an easy excerpt with your left hand while holding a pencil in your palm, and not letting the pencil touch the fretboard. That is the kind of position we aspire for in our left hand.
• If your hand is actually supporting the weight of the guitar, or clamping on it in a way that would cause your palm to touch the bottom of the fretboard, that might cause pain in your left hand over time.

Second thing:

• This is really hard to tell from this video, however, it looks like the fretboard might be sticking out too far towards the left from the rest of your body. It also feels like the guitar is quite horizontal - perhaps a slightly higher angle might help with that.
• Try "bringing in" the fretboard a little closer to your core, either by using a slightly less horizontal angle or just by shifting its position in your lap closer to the right leg, rather than fully with the concavity of the body of the guitar resting solely on the left leg.
• This can be best demonstrated through video - would you like to submit a recording of yourself playing any piece you want for one of my virtual masterclasses? The word "masterclass" might make it seem like you need to be a master to submit anything, but that couldn't be further from the truth. All levels are absolutely! welcome in those
• (I think the idea is, etymologically, that it's supposed to be a class with the master, not a class exclusively for those who are masters, haha  though it feels very strange and self-congratulatory calling myself a master )

Desi Husband Thank you Desi!! Haha

Bill Dodd Hi Bill! Great job!!! Congratulations on sending this in.

Questionnaire: you got it all perfectly!  Nothing to say here at all!

Exercises:

• 2a: You got all the notes and the parallel voices! Great job. The metronome did get away from you there at certain times, interestingly however, that was already the case when you started! You didn't quite get further off from tempo once you got into the rhythm of it, but you sort of started in the middle of the beat. Try taking a bit more time to feel the beat before you start - don't worry about letting the metronome play by itself for a couple of beats! I think that could make it work perfectly.
• 2b: Basically perfect!!! Congratulations once again 
• 2c: In this one, you got the order of values right: each shorter note was shorter than the ones before and each longer note was longer than the ones before. Great job on that! Unfortunately though, your beat was not consistent throughout. This was most apparent in measures 2 and 5. It seems like your eighth notes are a bit too fast and your sixteenth are a bit too slow. You did maintain a steady pace when you had multiple notes of the same value in a row! Try practicing this one with a slow metronome too! (1 beat = 1 quarter note)
• 2d: This one was almost perfect until measure 4! Measure 4 is the hardest though - therefore, it is quite understandable that you'd have more trouble there. Try playing everything in a slower rhythm - this one is treacherous, it makes you believe it will be slow because of the repeated quarter notes in measure one, but then it gets quite a lot faster when you get to measure 4. Starting quite a bit slower (think, half your original tempo) might help!
• 2e: Great job!!! You got all the notes and accidentals and the right idea with the dotted rhythm! Try "dotting" the rhythm a little more - basically, making a bigger difference between the long and the short note. Right now, the dotted notes sound like two units (1, 2) while the short notes sound like 1. Your ratio is 2-1, so to say. See if you can get it to 3-1 for this exercise!
• 2g: Very good!!! 2 things: In measures 2 and 4, you took a bit of a long time before and after the very first note. Try working on not adding any empty time between the measures, although they are separated by bar lines and involve the changing of left-hand positions. Second thing: you can strum these chords! You don't have to, but it would make it easier on your right hand.

Wonderful job on everything once again!!! Thanks for sending this in!

Barry van de Graaf hi Barry! Congratulations, this is sounding great!!! 

• 2a: Perfect!!! Nothing for me to say here at all!
• 2b: Very good job! This one is tricky: the chord changes make it hard to stay within the rhythm. You mostly got it, but you do tend to add in a small rest before each new chord. Try practicing quite slowly and very consciously fighting against allowing the new chord to slow you down!
• 2c: Amazing!!! This was perfect! Best version I heard of this exercise so far! 
• 2d: Almost as good as the one before! Congratulations!! One thing, in the last measure, you did add in a quarter note at the beginning of the measure that was not written. Otherwise, you got this!
• 2e: Perfect! Once again, absolutely nothing for me to say there!!!  Great sense of rhythm and great job reading all this music in general! So happy to see this!

Paul: hi Paul! Sorry for taking a bit longer to answer this! It fell through the cracks for a couple of days, but I found it  congratulations for these, and thank you for sending in the update!! Great job on all these exercises, too!

1e: Perfect!  Nothing for me to say here at all!

2a: Good job overall, just a couple of quick notes: 1) there were some accidental rests introduced between different left-hand chord shapes, which is absolutely normal, but still something we should fight against when practicing our rhythm; 2) at the end of measure 2, you reversed the order of the high melody notes - instead of B, G, you played G, B; 3) you're slowing down towards the end - try starting the entire exercise in a slower tempo instead!

2b: Nice work! Be careful not to introduce these accidental rests between chords, in places where your left hand changes shape, like between measures 1 and 2. One other thing - sharps are maintained for the entire duration of a measure where they occur, in the same octave, unless there is a "natural" sign to cancel them out later. Therefore, the chord on the second half of measure one was also supposed to contain a G sharp on the third string, rather than a G natural.

2c: Generally very very good! One thing though, every time you have a series of 4 sixteenth notes, you play them as triplets. Try to actually squeeze 4 not in there - and if it's hard, taking everything slower in this exercise might help 

2d: Alright, this was very interesting! You started playing everything in tempo, and successfully maintained the relationship between most notes. However, at the beginning of measure 3, you've actually switched to half tempo, and you stayed there for the entire rest of the exercise, with the exception of the last note in measure 3, which was back to normal tempo. Try taking it very slowly and keep in mind - sixteenth notes are fast! Four of these are supposed to fit in the same duration as each one of the opening quarter notes (at the very beginning of the exercise.)