Lesson: Extension and Contraction of the Right Hand

This is from my Lesson of the Week segment of the site. The idea of Extension and Contraction is so common for the left hand but rarely practiced in the right hand. I’m using Exercise 21 from Ricardo Iznaola’s Kitharologus: The Path to Virtuosity (Amazon). This book starts off super easy but gets gradually more difficult (to high…high levels). However, I love how sequential and progressive the book is, it’s probably the best book I’ve seen for guitar. Just don’t get your hopes up about finishing the book because it truly for those in it for the long run. You can find more free lessons at the lesson archive page.

Bradford Werner

Bradford Werner is a classical guitarist and music publisher from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He originally created this site for his students at the Victoria Conservatory of Music but now shares content worldwide. Curating guitar content helps students absorb the culture, musical ideas, and technique of the classical guitar. Bradford also has a YouTube channel with over 94,000 subscribers and 13 million views. He taught classical guitar at the Victoria Conservatory of Music for 16 years and freelanced in Greater Victoria for 20 years and now dedicates much of his time curating content online and helping connect the classical guitar community. See more at his personal website.

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Tom

October 28, 2016 / 10:31 pm Reply

Thanks and super timely. I spent about 5 or 6 hours working on this exercise earlier this week. (If you had posted the video a week earlier, it would have been even more timely.) BTW – you’re right about the book being intense, it took me about a year and half to get through the first level…. I hope it doesn’t get even more intense.

One thing. I notice you didn’t say much about specific hand position, finger angles, etc. Not sure if that was intentional. IME working on the exercises in Izanola’s book causes you to develop good position/technique without really thinking about it because you can’t get really good tone if you don’t, and your hands seem to figure this out naturally by trial and error as long as you are using your ears. Or….. am I just being naive? Thoughts?