A History of Guitar Styles (Part I)
In Part I of this Lagniappe Lesson series, Mr. Josh Theriot walks you through the evolution of the guitar styles from the Renaissance-Classical periods.
Guitar Styles (Renaissance-Classical Periods)
- contributed by Josh T.
When I was first starting to learn how to play guitar, I really didn't play too many styles, mostly rock, a little blues. It's mostly because that's what I listened to at the time. I hadn't been exposed to a bunch of different styles of music. It wasn't until later on that I started to venture off into jazz and classical. I discovered that not only did it offer a bunch of different techniques and new tones and ideas, but then I also really just enjoyed the music.
So whether you're first starting out playing guitar, studying guitar, if you've done it for a few years now, one of the best things I can recommend to you is just to listen to all kinds of different music, because you never know what you're going to discover and what certain genres are going to offer to your playing. So the purpose of this video is just to kind of run through a bunch of different guitar styles, show you some of the cool features of each, and hopefully inspire you to go out on your own and take a listen to something new.
We're going to start way back in the early, early, early history of guitar, basically when the instrument was first created back in the Renaissance era, so we're talking like 15th century here. Back then, guitars did not look the way they do today. They were a little bit different, but the concept was still the same. You still had a string that was tightened to the point where when you'd pluck it, you'd hear a pitched sound, okay? And the tighter that that string is, the more the pitch goes up. If it gets loose, the pitch goes down.
Now there's another way to change the pitch on the guitar. You can take the length of the string and increase or decrease it. An increased string length will make a lower pitch, and the shorter ones make higher pitches. So the way that you can do this on a guitar is by using these metal frets. If you notice, we have these up and down metal bars that go all the way across the fret board here. So whenever you're fretting a guitar, what you're actually doing is pushing a string down far enough to make contact with this metal fret. Once it does that, the string can no longer vibrate from end to end. It can only vibrate between the bridge and the point where it makes contact with that fret.
Now the higher you go up here, the higher the pitch goes. So as the string length decreases or increases the pitch changes with it, okay? So back in sort of the earliest dawns of music, they didn't have all the harmonies and complexities that we have in music today. It was still kind of in its infancy. So Renaissance music borrows heavily from Middle-Age music, which was not very complicated. Most of their harmonies were simple fifths like that. A lot of the music included a lot of droning sounds, which just means that we had a continuous note going on underneath maybe a melody, a moving melody.
So one of the things we're going to talk about today is how Renaissance music used droning strings. And I'm going to teach you something really, really simple you can do. Once your guitar's in tune, if you pluck the open A with the open E all the way at the bottom here, you're creating what's called a fifth interval between the A and the E. That number five just comes from its position in the scale. So if you started a major scale at A, one, two, three, four, five, your fifth note would be E, so this creates a fifth or what we now call a power cord. It's a very simple harmony. It's very safe harmony. If you notice, those notes really work well together. It's a very stable sound. So you might've had this going on in the background in Renaissance music, and on top of that you would put what's called a melody.
So let's talk about what melody is. Melody is just a single succession of moving musical tones. For instance, that's an example of a melody. Harmony comes in when you introduce another note on top of that. So once you have more than one note interacting with each other, that becomes a harmony. So with this drone, I can add a harmony on top of that or a melody on top of it. And now the melody's going to interact with my harmony. So here's an example of something simple that maybe you might have heard back in the Renaissance period. Now in terms of difficulty, that's not very difficult. Like I said, back in the early musical period, it wasn't very complicated, so the technique had not been complicated yet. You know, guitar was a pretty new instrument back then.
Now shortly after your Renaissance period, you have what's called the baroque period. It came before classical, and so the way that you actually played the guitar typically was going to be with your fingers. So they got a little adventurous with the fingers here, and they started to develop what we call today, the PIMA technique, which is named after these four fingers. So the Spanish names for your fingers, [foreign language 00:06:12] in the middle, P-I-M-A. Now on a string chart, if I was going to give you the order of strings to pluck first, I would put a P over the string that I wanted you to pluck with your thumb, an I on the string that you pluck with your index finger. The M would be middle finger, and the A would be your ring finger. So if I wanted to use that particular pattern, P-I-M-A, it would mean or ... in that order.
Now you could change those letters around. Let's say you wanted to do P-A-M-I and switch it around like that. Or you could change which strings each finger actually gets. So if I wanted to put P on the lower string, I can put it all the way down here, and the other three fingers I could put up here or one of these three strings, so it gives you a lot of options on your cords. You're going to always choose a different set of strings to actually play, and you can get different parts of the chord there.
So back to this baroque period, and this just came right before the classical period. Again, guitar is still kind of in its infancy. There really weren't too many compositions written specifically for guitar. A lot of the baroque guitar music you hear today was maybe written for a keyboard instrument, and people just transcribed it for guitar. So baroque period was definitely known for what's called counterpoint. Counterpoint is when you have one melody kind of facing another melody, and they create their own harmonies by the interaction of the two. Sometimes you could have three, four, five different melodies going on at one time. Obviously, the more melodies you have, the more complex the music is going to be, but you can keep it simple with just two melodies.
So here's an example of when you take two melodies and put them together. Here's my first melody. And here's the melody I'm going to play with that. Now let's see if we can put them together some kind of way. So now we have kind of something interesting. It's better than each melody on its own, which is the point of using counterpoint. So that's something that really defined the baroque era, but again, not too many compositions written specifically for guitar. That's going to come later.
So right after your baroque period, you have the classical period, and this is the first one that I would say most people know pretty well. Classical guitar, and this is a classical guitar, if you notice the sound is kind of dull. That's because these strings are made out of nylon, and nylon is a more modern material. Back in the classical era, guitars would have been strung with gut strings, which even though they had that same kind of dull, sweet flavor, they did not last very long. They're very high maintenance, and you have to tune them all the time. They were always stretching out, so nylon's a little bit better, and it still offers you that same kind of sweet, sweet sound. Another cool thing about the nylon strings is you don't have to put them quite as tight as a steel-stringed instrument would, so there's not as much strain on the neck and when you go to actually push the string down to fret it, it's not nearly as difficult as say a steel-string guitar.
You'll also find on your classical guitars, the nut up here, it's a little bit wider than other guitars, and that's basically to give your fingers a little more breathing room down here. You can get some pretty weird, intricate, stretched-out chord patterns happening on the left hand, because of this extra space between the strings. That's important because when you have notes that are really bunched up close together, you don't want one finger interacting with another string.
To me, one of the cool things about the classical period is all the different musical ornaments that came out in the compositions around this time. So what a musical ornament is, it's basically something that's not necessary for the music, but something that really dresses it up pretty well. I'll give you an example.
Now shortly after your Renaissance period, you have what's called the baroque period. It came before classical, and so the way that you actually played the guitar typically was going to be with your fingers. So they got a little adventurous with the fingers here, and they started to develop what we call today, the PIMA technique, which is named after these four fingers. So the Spanish names for your fingers, [foreign language 00:06:12] in the middle, P-I-M-A. Now on a string chart, if I was going to give you the order of strings to pluck first, I would put a P over the string that I wanted you to pluck with your thumb, an I on the string that you pluck with your index finger. The M would be middle finger, and the A would be your ring finger. So if I wanted to use that particular pattern, P-I-M-A, it would mean or ... in that order.
Now you could change those letters around. Let's say you wanted to do P-A-M-I and switch it around like that. Or you could change which strings each finger actually gets. So if I wanted to put P on the lower string, I can put it all the way down here, and the other three fingers I could put up here or one of these three strings, so it gives you a lot of options on your cords. You're going to always choose a different set of strings to actually play, and you can get different parts of the chord there.
So back to this baroque period, and this just came right before the classical period. Again, guitar is still kind of in its infancy. There really weren't too many compositions written specifically for guitar. A lot of the baroque guitar music you hear today was maybe written for a keyboard instrument, and people just transcribed it for guitar. So baroque period was definitely known for what's called counterpoint. Counterpoint is when you have one melody kind of facing another melody, and they create their own harmonies by the interaction of the two. Sometimes you could have three, four, five different melodies going on at one time. Obviously, the more melodies you have, the more complex the music is going to be, but you can keep it simple with just two melodies.
So here's an example of when you take two melodies and put them together. Here's my first melody. And here's the melody I'm going to play with that. Now let's see if we can put them together some kind of way. So now we have kind of something interesting. It's better than each melody on its own, which is the point of using counterpoint. So that's something that really defined the baroque era, but again, not too many compositions written specifically for guitar. That's going to come later.
So right after your baroque period, you have the classical period, and this is the first one that I would say most people know pretty well. Classical guitar, and this is a classical guitar, if you notice the sound is kind of dull. That's because these strings are made out of nylon, and nylon is a more modern material. Back in the classical era, guitars would have been strung with gut strings, which even though they had that same kind of dull, sweet flavor, they did not last very long. They're very high maintenance, and you have to tune them all the time. They were always stretching out, so nylon's a little bit better, and it still offers you that same kind of sweet, sweet sound. Another cool thing about the nylon strings is you don't have to put them quite as tight as a steel-stringed instrument would, so there's not as much strain on the neck and when you go to actually push the string down to fret it, it's not nearly as difficult as say a steel-string guitar.
You'll also find on your classical guitars, the nut up here, it's a little bit wider than other guitars, and that's basically to give your fingers a little more breathing room down here. You can get some pretty weird, intricate, stretched-out chord patterns happening on the left hand, because of this extra space between the strings. That's important because when you have notes that are really bunched up close together, you don't want one finger interacting with another string.
To me, one of the cool things about the classical period is all the different musical ornaments that came out in the compositions around this time. So what a musical ornament is, it's basically something that's not necessary for the music, but something that really dresses it up pretty well. I'll give you an example.
One of the easiest ones to get started with is called a grace note. A grace note is just a very, very quick note that you're going to hit on the way to kind of a target note.
So let's say this is my target note. On the way to that target note, I'm going to hit this note really, really quickly and it will sound like this. Or I could do it from above. Let's say this was going to be my grace note, and that's my target note. It would sound like this. So if you notice, that note is not really necessary. it passes so quickly that your ear almost doesn't have a chance to land on it. It just kind of dresses it up pretty nicely. So if you take a more contemporary melody that we all know, like Mary Had a Little Lamb, here's how it would sound with a grace note in it. That was just one little grace note right there. It was just something to make your music a little more decorated. It's ornamental. It's a decoration.
If you take that grace note idea, you can expand that to have all kinds of different variations, and that's mostly where the rest of the musical ornaments come from. So another really cool thing they used to do in the classical period was what's called a trill. A trill is whenever you take two notes, and you kind of rapid fire between the two. So let's say I wanted this note and this note. I would go back and forth between them almost as quickly as you could possibly play, and it could be extended like that, or it could just be really, really quickly.
Now if you take the concept of a trill, and I'm going to take away all the repetitions of it, because a trill lasts for a little bit. Let's just do one. So I start on the main note, the target note. I'm going to go down and then come right back up to where I started. This is what's called a mordent. Now mordents can be in the down direction or the up direction. So for instance, here's a lower mordent where I'm moving downm and then the upper mordent when I move up. So again, let's throw that into Mary Had a Little Lamb and see what we can get. So I threw in a lower and an upper for you, and it dresses it up a little bit. But again, Mary Had a Little Lamb would sound just as cool going ... without these. So it's not like it's an essential part of the music. Again, it's just something there to kind of dress it up a little bit.
Now the last one I'm going to talk about before we move on to the next style is what's called an appoggiatura. This is used in all kinds of different music. It's not just guitar music. An appoggiatura is basically like when you're going to delay the target note. So let's say that A is the target note. Before hitting that A, I might hit a G and then back up to the A, or a B and then A. Or maybe both of them, what's on top and what's underneath the target before getting to it. And that's what's called an escape tone, where we kind of surround the target note before actually hitting it. If you combine that with the upper and lower mordent, you get what's called a turn.
So let's see if we can throw that into our Mary Had a Little Lamb. So that was a lower mordent. Another lower mordent. There's the trill. That was an appoggiatura. And then we went to a minor chord in the end, but that was a turn. Those are aren't the only musical ornaments, but those are the more useful ones. You're going to see later on in a bunch of different other styles, we're going to take those and modify them to fit different types of music or different instruments.