How to Play Gavotte II for Classical Guitar

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is John Armstrong with expertvillage.com. I’m a professional guitar instructor, and today I’ll be discussing some advanced classical guitar pieces. Next, I’d like to discuss a piece entitled Gavotte II by Johann Sebastian Bach. It’s a very nice piece in the key of D major. You notice that we have 2 sharps, both F sharps and C sharps; watch for those. Starts off…Let’s discuss the first phrase or the first few measures. Notice the first 5 measures get repeated. So we’re starting here basically outlining a D chord, doing a suspension by doing a pull off. Again. Then if you see above here, we see a roman numeral 2 with a 3 right by it that’s know as the bar. The first 3 strings at the 3rd fret, do so with my first finger. We also have a F sharp and a D note, so we have a D chord, a first inversion D chord. You may see above at the end of measure 4, the inverted mordant symbol, which is just basically a quick pull off, hammer on. It’s an inverted mordant. A regular mordant would be hammer on, pull off. This is inverted. Again, the whole first phrase. "