The guitar is a complex instrument allowing the player a rich variety of musical enjoyment in both accompaniment and solo playing.
As a guitarist of over 40 years experience - equally adept at playing and singing songs to complex solo guitar pieces be the music folk, country, blues, light jazz, pop, standards, classical, flamenco - Mr. Hannemann has developed a unique guitar method, "Music and Guitar" which takes the student through all apsects of guitar playing. The first volume, "Music and Guitar: Fundamentals" and the separate volume "Guitar Solos" are both available at the Los Alamos Mesa Public Library.
As a student you will learn the following:
--- Music literacy: Music is, and has, its own language, much like verbal languages. Knowing the fundamental elements of music, reading notation, understanding scales, chords, melody, harmony and the interaction of musical elements will allow the student to
--- play written music
--- create an accompaniment or solo arrangement for a given melody
--- express one's own musical thought in original music writing.
--- Fretboard mastery: most of the notes available on the guitar may be played in more than one location; e.g. b' (b above middle c) can be played on the 2nd string open, 3rd string 4th fret, 4th string 9th fret, 5th string 14th fret, and (though rarely used) 6th string 19th fret. Fretboard mastery allows the student to have access to every note, every string, every fret across the length of the fretboard and to readily and easily play passages and chords on the entire instrument. This is an essential skill which should be mastered fairly early.
--- Finger-style and associated playing technique: increase the variety of playing techniques available to you --
--- Strumming ("rhythm guitar") from simple to complex accompaniment rhythms
--- Rasquedo ("rashayo") the brilliant strum technique from flamenco
--- Arpeggio ("broken chord") ideal for accompaniments
--- Harmonics, natural and "pinched"
--- Tambour
--- Golpe, tapping
--- Tremolo, on a single string or on multiple adjacent strings
--- Brush Stroke Tremolo, allowing the tremolo effect for an entire chord
--- Rest stroke and Free stroke, allowing differentiation of multiple melodic lines
--- Muting techniques - right hand and left hand finger mutes, and the right hand palm
mute
--- Hammers and lifts
Chords and harmony -- learn the essentials of spelling chords, playing chords, and using chords in harmonizing a melody in both accompaniment (sing along) and solo playing
--- Polyphonic playing: Being able to play melody, bass, and intenal harmony lines simultaneously.
