One of the side-effects I’ve noticed from playing classical music on the guitar, is that it has greatly improved my chops.  I don’t just mean in the sense that I’m playing difficult stuff, but also that I’m playing things that aren’t meant for the guitar and sometimes I need to find creative ways to play them.

Let’s face it, we guitarists tend to play “guitaristic” things that fall easily on the guitar.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  It’s perfectly natural to play what feels more comfortable on an instrument because it tends to sound better; taking the path of least resistance, so to speak.  However, it’s nice to break out of one’s comfort zone every once in a while to expand one’s technique.

For example, look at his run from Bach’s Sinfonia in B Minor:

Now those are the notes, but it would be pretty tough to play that up to speed.  It was pretty obvious from the beginning that I needed to find a different way to play this. How about sweep/alternate picking?

Ok, that’s better.  An added bonus is that musically it sounds a lot more interesting this way. But the constant back-and-forth still makes it difficult and somewhat uncomfortable.  Maybe if I practiced enough, but I opted for the tapping route: 

Now we’re talking.  This is much easier to play, and sounds even better in my opinion.  Still, it’s not a very common tapping pattern, so it took me while to get it down.  Keep in mind this is the easiest run of many to come in this piece.  It took me a lot of experimenting to find the best way to play each of them.  Maybe I’ll get into more specifics in future posts.

Check out this video to see me play the whole thing.