Getting a "Good" Tone on Classical Guitar

Video Transcript

" Alright, now we are going to talk just a little bit about right hand technique to produce some good tone. A lot goes into this; it can be pretty tedious at first but there are some basic rules that you can follow for teaching yourself to have good tone. Now you’ll remember that when I’m doing these demonstration like I mentioned before you usually have your P finger which is the thumb on one of the base strings. You’re going to have I, M and A on the G, B and E strings and you kind of just let them rest right there. It will be a good position to start. Now, what you don’t want to do with trying to make good tone is have a raspy sound. You don’t want a lot of string noise, you don’t want it to be too bright like this. You don’t want it to be too dark like this. That way it’s really not pronounced, you can’t hear much. What you want to do is be very focused, right over the Rosette, play at an angle which is across the strings like so, not too much this way and not too much this way. But across the strings like this it will create a very clear present tone. You will hear a bright ping as you play the string followed by the actual sound of the note so you will, that is pretty much what you want to be listening for. What you don’t want to hear is things like this, a lot of string noise before the note is played. That means bad tone. You don’t want it to be to bright like this, which is caused by playing too much across the string. In general if you just find a good clear bell-like sound that is your ultimate goal. When you are practicing these, do them slowly and listen for every little nuance of the sound and you should hear a nice even tone for every string. One thing you can do to really help out is go to the library check out some CD’s or things like that. Listen to a lot of guitar players, go to live shows and really the best way to figure out good tone is by listening to others play."