Employment opportunities

An excellent source of employment for guitarists is 'pit work': playing for musicals as part of a band. Those with experience in this kind of work will know that such scores are often around 70% chord symbols. Sometimes, composers will write chords in staff notation alone, but with no consideration as to whether the given voicing is idiomatic. It is assumed (fairly I think) that the player will identify the chord and voice it themselves. 'Pit' guitarists will often find chord symbols in pencil on their hired parts, added by previous generations of players.

Improving Musicianship and Sight reading

A fascinating spin-off of learning to read chord symbols is that players will see a marked improvement in their sight reading of staff notation. Why should this be? When you think about it, the vast majority of classical guitar music (and by this I mean music written for the six-stringed Spanish guitar rather than music of the Classical period) is written by guitarists. The result is that tonal music tends to be in keys which use open strings: what we refer to as 'easy' keys. If a teacher gives a student a score with a key signature of 4 flats and the pitches Eb and Bb on the top space and middle lines respectively, I would bet that more than half would play two open strings. This is because we link those visual cues to open strings, rather than a number of possible pitches. The reason classical guitarists struggle with sight reading in flat keys is because we haven't been trained to read them.

Many jazz standards are in 'flat' keys as these are preferable for horns of all kinds ('horns' being an expression jazz players use for pretty much any instrument you blow). As a result, the use of stopped or fretted notes becomes a necessity. Furthermore, when playing jazz styles, a 'closed' string sound is generally preferable, as opposed to the folk-like sound of open-string sonorities. Players will find themselves becoming familiar with all keys as their studies progress.

As you practice reading chords, you will find that your aural ability will improve tremendously. Players learn the sound of intervals as something with expressive meaning.

Flexibility as a Musician

Many classical guitarists express their unhappiness as to their lack of flexibility as players. Some regard jazz players as extraordinarily gifted and this leads to awful expressions such as 'You can either play jazz or you can't'. Utter nonsense. As the great Jazz piano teacher, Mark Levine says:

"A great jazz solo consists of 1% magic, 99% stuff that is explainable, analyzable, categorizeable, doable.

Conversely, jazz players regard the classical guitarist's ability to read a piece by Tedesco for example as nearly supernatural! This leads to suspicion and jealousy on both sides which are negative and destructive. A few jokes spring to mind:

Q: How do you get a Jazz guitarist to turn his amp down?

A: Give him a score to read.

Q: How do you get a classical guitarist to turn his amp down?

A: Tell him to take a solo.

And so on. Many of our finest concert players such as Gary Ryan, are very versatile as musicians. They find joy, and employment, in this versatility.

Aims:

• fully understand the theory behind chord notation
• learn 'transferable shapes'
• learn the fingerboard
• develop the ear
• make classical players more versatile
• explore our beautiful instrument to its full potential and to renew our sense of joy in playing it.