on Arriving Prepared · Classical Guitar Community

Aug '25 (edited) • Gear

on Arriving Prepared

I want to share something that has come up (again - and again and again) today with my students. The need to arrive prepared. This can be extrapolated to many situations, of course, but I'd like to talk about the mistakes we make while studying or performing. And it is very closely related to many posts and answers I've been reading in many previous posts. It relates to efficiency but also to expressiveness, to relaxation and to security.

Some times we clearly identify some bars or passages or motives that present some technical difficulty and since we have them identified, we isolate them and study them conscientiously and dedicate quite a bit of time to them... and then while we are playing two things happend: a) we make mistakes somewhere else, or b) we fall down in that same place we have been studying like crazy.

This is due to some missconception that the complexity is local to the passage instead of the piece as a whole (and even the situation as a whole but that's another matter). Many times we resolve the passage in question but when we are playing we arrive to that passage in different conditions to the ones we have studied it isolated (i.e: more tensed or tired or with the fingers or hand in a different position). We tend to dedicate much more time to the things that are more difficult to us than the ones that come up easier. And I think that's a mistake. For once, neglecting the easy parts many times is cause of distress during performance and cause of "miss-interpretation" exactly in those easy parts. And then, many times not having studied the easy parts or the parts previous to the "difficulty" cause us to arrive at that point not in our best disposition.

Dedicating time of study to the easy parts: prevents senseless accumulation of tension, allows for maximum enjoyment through the piece, gives rest to both hands in very narrow windows, allows us to arrive to more demanding passages in our best shape and over all gives us the chance to do more music.

What do you say? Do you make a habit of studying the easy parts as much as the difficult ones?

I only really study the hard parts

I study much more time the hard passages than the easy ones

I study them both equally

I don't like studying the difficult parts. I just study the easy ones :-)

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