Lagrima by Francisco Tarrega is one of my favorite pieces to play. I played it in my first ever student recital many moons ago and have continued to play it ever since. If you prefer standard notation then check out this page. Here is how it is broken down:
mm. 1-4 (0:00)
mm. 5-8 (3:07)
Interpretation of mm. 1-8 (6:07)
mm. 9-12 (7:58)
mm. 13-16 (14:14)
Interpretation of mm. (16:44)
This is an improvisation I did a year ago which Bhadra then added words to it.
Here are the lyrics: How could I not love your little ocean blue eyes?
How can I just not see the only sun which shone through, all those years of terrible grey skies? How could I not just love you… For all the times you’ve been there…
Mending all those broken strings of my heart…?
How could I not… … … Just love you?
This is a practicing video. I turned the camera on and just started playing. No edits and I crashed and burned at the end of the Godfather theme. Here is the order:
Eyşan Unutamıyorum (0:07) This is a piece I started playing a few years ago when an Instagram friend suggested I make a guitar arrangement of it. It is now one of my favorite pieces to play.
Funky Soul Butter (1:42) This is a piece I composed a couple of years ago. I wrote a bass line to a dance track I wrote. I wondered if it would work on the guitar (it did) and the piece was written in a couple of days.
Abana in Heaven (4:43) This is a piece I arranged a two years ago. It was played a lot in the church that I go to and I love love love this melody.
A Beautiful Flower (6:56) I composed this piece two years ago. It started out as a musical cryptogram I composed out of the letters of a friends name. I will often compose pieces for friends birthdays based on the letters of their name. I loved this one so much that I gave it a different title.
The Godfather Theme (8:18) I remember watching these movies back in high school and was really struck by the music. I have been playing this theme since then. I also love that Slash (my favorite guitarist) plays this in his live shows.
-Rob
A Soup of Beethoven for Erhu and Guitar. Includes Für Elise, 5th Symphony, Sonata Pathétique, Violin Concerto, and the 9th Symphony. This has been a lot of fun collaborating with Onion. She lives in Hawaii and I live in Michigan. I would record my part and then send it to her. She would record her part and then send that back to me and I would then put the video together.
Melancholy comes from my Red Guitar Suite. It is a group of pieces I composed, inspired by my 1972 Ramirez. The score/tab is free at my website.
I have gotten a questions lately about how to go about doing free improvisations. My two main points are…
1. Try and be in the moment
2. There are no wrong notes
I have been composing more lately (as opposed to making arrangements). One way I will compose is by improvising on an idea in order to generate ideas for the piece. I’d like to make a solo guitar arrangement of a piece I improvised using the program Max/MSP. The piece is called, Gentle Waves…
I like the melody and the basic idea but I would like to play it on guitar without using Max/MSP. I just did this improvisation using some of the basic ideas of the piece…
Here is my arrangement of Scarborough Fair. Score/tab is available here. I’ve always loved this melody. It’s an old English folk song that uses the dorian mode.
To create the dorian mode, you first begin with the natural minor…
and then raise the 6th note in the scale (C becomes C-sharp)….
Like many people, I first heard this song from the Simon and Garfunkel version….
I decided to compose guitar music for the Grimm Fairy Tale, Little Red Riding Hood, because I thought it would be fun. I started this project back in October (2019) and finished writing it about a week ago. I got sidetracked with other projects which is why it took so long.
Throughout this piece I use a lot of different extended techniques for the guitar to try and create various moods. At times I pluck the string to the left of my left hand fingers, I hit the fingerboard with my right hand, I strum notes over the sound hole and so on. I hope you enjoy it. I don’t have the best voice to be a narrator but since I am stuck at home because of the virus, that is really all I’ve got.
-Rob
Here is a little improvisation I did using the Redline Reverb setting, Lush Universe.
Enjoy!
-Rob
