About a week ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down with my good friend and colleague Amir London to record a couple of classical guitar pieces. Although I had made some practice recordings of myself and my nylon string in the past, and although I’ve been around the recording studio, creating quality recordings of classical guitar music proved to be a challenging and rewarding experience.
You can listen to the recordings on my Listen page.
I decided that we would record two pieces that evening, and a third on a different evening. The two pieces I selected were Torija from Federico Moereno-Torroba’s Castles of Spain suite as well as the timeless and universally appreciated Lagrima by Francisco Tarrega.
The challenges presented in recording these pieces were both technical and artistic in nature. For starters, the weather here in the Bay Area was out of control – stormy, raining, then sunny for a moment, then back to torrential rains and so on – and moving in and out of this weather was to the detriment of the guitar staying in tune.
From a technique standpoint, it goes without saying that recording an un-effected solo instrument is highly unforgiving. Even the slightest nuances and tiniest errors are not left out of the picture. Suffice it to say, I heard many positive things in my playing as well as minor annoyances that I hadn’t caught before. Correcting some of these tiny “errors” required an even more focused attention to detail.
From an artistic standpoint, my goal was to capture the emotion of these two pieces through nuanced and emotive playing. In particular I strove to bring attention to the beauty and elegance of each note in Torija, a piece named after the majestic Castle of Torija. With Lagrima I wanted to make the piece my own. After watching many examples of people playing this piece on YouTube, I realized that my interpretation is somewhat unique. The priority was to breathe life into the piece by giving the melody a real shape and contour. (Speaking of YouTube, check out Per-Olov Kindgren’s version of Largrima. The best I’ve seen so far – truly beautiful).
The third piece will be recorded later on. I’m debating between recording Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Prelude No. 1 or Lily Afshar’s arrangement of the traditional Persian song Gol-e-Gandome. Who knows, maybe if I’m feeling hot I’ll do both.
So listen to the recordings and comment below to let me know what you think and how I did!
Mason
p.s. I laid down some jazz guitar and voice tracks with Lisa Schultz on vocals the other night. Keep your ears peeled!
