Your Weekly Dexterity and Stamina Exercise

Updated February 17, 2005

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There's a Reason Why These are Known as Classics

The Apoyando Part Two...

And be they exercise, study or concert classic, there are gems of wisdom, artistry and technique to be gathered and incorporated. Sor's Etudes... Segovia collected twenty of these pieces from two (I believe) different opus numbers, hoping to present a clear and graded progression of technical difficulty while covering some very important technical hurdles for the student guitarist. And while I don't think anyone in the past forty years has included a selection of these etudes as part of a concert program, they are still attractive enough to allow them to teach the lessons they need to -- while not boring the player into a coma.

Study number five was part of my first lesson with Albert Blain who took a few minutes to generate the pencil marks you see here. (And my apologies to whomever may hold the rights to this piece, but Blain marked it up and I can't think of any other way to show these edits without reproducing the page.)

Well, I was seventeen at the time and had never heard of the apoyando technique, so Mr. Blain picked this study for me to reinforce what he'd taught at my lesson. (I also had an entire Carulli right-hand study book -- either 20 or 25 studies -- and two short pieces from his book, 700 Year of Music for the Classical Guitar. Not an easy task master was our Mr. Blain...)

Anyway, please see the session on Apoyando from a few months back. The main thrust of being assigned this piece was to get the student to make the notes indicated by the arrows stand out from the bass and supportive melody notes simply by using rest stroke on those arrowed notes and free stroke on the rest.

The secret (and trick, some might say) is to execute the rest stroke without changing the position of the right hand. There should be no rotation of the wrist. The middle finger is used for the rest stroke just about throughout. The knuckles of this finger should be all that change position. Obviously the apoyando requires a straighter finger than the free stroke which simply by its execution requires the finger to curl through its travel.