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Part 1
The reason it took so long is that I wanted to do it on my nylon, as classical music should be played on nylon. Part 1 was done on my steel string only because I was overseas and didn't have my nylon string with me. When I returned I found that my Gibson nylon had bulged a bit in the warm humid summer and had thrown the intonation out past the 7th fret or so. Part 2 sounded awful because most of it is played up there. The other day I realized that my other nylon string, my very first 'good' guitar, a Goya bought new in 1967, was sitting in the guitar rack, and even though it has the opposite problem, a sunken soundboard*, its intonation is perfect. As soon as I tried it out on the old Goya, it sounded sweet, so ... here is part 2.
Part 2 is a far greater challenge that part 1. Part 1 is in Em and takes advantage of the many open strings inherent in that key. Part 2 modulates to E major and that ease of positions and fingerings goes right out the window. Part 2 requires very wide finger/hand stretches, as you'll see in the movie, and really does take some practice, if only just to stretch those tendons.
The Roman numerals for this section are:
| I - - | I - - | V - - | V - - | V - - | V - - | I - - | I - - |
| I - - | I - - | IV - - | IV - - | V - - | V - - | I - - | I - - |
There they are again! I, IV and V chords together. They really are the basis of all Western music, so the sooner you can track this trio of chords, the better. In the key of E, they are E, A and B7.
The picking pattern is exactly the same as the first half, with those triplets cascading throughout, melody notes riding above it all, bass notes underpinning one to the bar. It's a beautiful piece of music, and that transition from minor to major is just spine tingling ... to me anyway.
You'll see and hear in the movie that I play the last two bars of part 1 so you can hear the transition. Part 2 starts at the E major chord, bar
5, and you'll quickly see that it's a whole different kettle of fish. Just about every position requires concentrated effort to keep everything nice and ringing. I haven't played this kind of thing for years, having migrated over to bluesy
slide guitar decades ago, but I did my best. A couple of hours of playing was needed though, to brush away the cobwebs, before I dared shoot the movie. This is NOT for beginners by any means.
The chords indicated in the movie are the basic chords ... the tab goes into a little more detail. The melody notes, as they change, keep altering the flavor of the underlying chord, in fact for one moment the V chord turns into a v chord ... a minorized V ... not a common occurrence, especially in classical music.
In case you have been practicing to the file that LittleFeat posted a while back, you're going to see that I play it slightly differently. I'm doing it the way I learned all those years ago. I think it was around 1966 or so that I sat myself down at the turntable and learned it by ear, note by note. Back then, it was THE piece to learn if you were thinking about being a classical guitarist ... sort of the 'Stairway to Heaven' for classical players.
I wrote it out in
GuitarPro in 9/8 time ... not being an expert in time signatures I can't vouch for its 'correctness'. It just made it cleaner looking in the tab to do it this way. Part 1 was written out in 3/4 time, with triplets cluttering it all up.
Follow this part with a repeat of part 1, then play part 2 again, and I think that's the structure of the whole piece.
*
You can see in the inset portion of the movie that the soundboard has sunken down due to a broken strut. It looks like the guitar has no soundhole!
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