I'm trying to get better at fingerstyle, and I'm working my way through Mauro Giuliani's 120 Studies for Right Hand Development. It's mostly differing patterns for the right hand to play while the left holds down a chord. I'm trying to play as accurately as possible, which means not letting the notes ring longer than their value.
What I'm trying to do is figure out the best way to mute the strings after I've played them, I'm just not sure when I should use each method. I can lift up my left hand for some notes, put my right hand fingers back down on the strings they just played, or I can play a rest stroke, but all of these work best at different times.
For example, in exercise 1 I can easily put my right hand back down in the same position to mute all the strings. I do this for simple arpeggios too. It gets harder in to do this in exercise 3, but I can adapt. It gets more difficult to do it this way in exercise 4, but if I try performing rest strokes, my ring finger just gets in the way of my thumb. And I can't mute by lifting up my left hand since it involves open strings. What would I do here?
Help?
Executive summary: Taking into consideration what my hands are doing at the time, which method should I use to mute strings to stop them from ringing past their time value? How do you handle this, and what's the 'correct' way according to classical guitar pedagogy?
Thanks
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You have to decide whether muting is appropriate or not in any given situation. Arpeggios are a good example. Just because they are written in eighth notes, for example, doesn't mean you should cut each note off before playing the next one. Most of the time, the desired effect of arpeggios is to have all the notes ringing out together to produce a chord. Muting would be wrong in that situation.
In cases where muting is required, (such as melodic lines or to avoid open strings clashing with the following chord)rests will usually be shown in the sheet music in the appropriate places. In that case, use either your picking hand thumb, or any free finger of either hand to mute.
Don't use rest stroke for the purpose of muting, especially with arpeggios. Its proper use is to bring out the volume and tone of melodic lines and separate them from the underlying bass and harmony.
The guitar sits in two worlds as far as phrasing goes.
If you're playing a melodic line, you need to act like a melodic instrument - like a trumpet or a violin. Notes should last as long as they're shown on the music, and you damp with either hand - either let up pressure on a fretting finger, or touch the string with a free picking finger.
If you're playing a harmonic line, like chord arpeggios, we can act like a piano. Think about where a pianist would "pedal" to sustain notes - you can let them ring so they overlap the next one.
Sometimes a composer will mark a score for the phrasing. Symbols you might see that translate into "let the notes ring longer" could be "sostenuto", "legato" (or a legato phrase line, which is a curve like you'd see in a hammer-on or pull-off that extends over several notes), a script "P" (for pedal; an asterisk - * - tells you when to stop letting them ring), long shapes that look kind of like our symbols for down-stroke extending over several notes (another way to mark piano pedalling), or even just "let ring" above part of a score. Symbols for "don't let it ring" are the various types of staccato marks (dots, wedges, etc. over notes), tenuto marks (short horizontal lines over notes), or technique terms like "pizzacato" (or "pizz") that would tell a violinist to pluck a note instead of bowing it, etc.
If there aren't any marks at all, it's left up to you to decide how to phrase it.
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