Originally, I thought I could keep up with my Exercise of the Week lesson, but I just don't have the time to be doing that on a weekly basis. So here is a toned down version - the Exercise of the Month. You can expect to see quite a wide variety of exercises here that will help you in many areas of your playing.
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In the monthly guitar lesson from March, I introduced you to pick style classical guitar using Mateo Carcassi's Caprice in D Minor. Carcassi is perhaps most well known for his Opus no. 60, which is a collection of technical studies used in the classical guitar community. For the most part, these studies are best suited to fingerstyle. Being a flatpicker with an interest in classical guitar (though recently I have been learing genuine fingerstyle guitar which may creep into a future guitar lesson...), I came across the book Classical Studies For Pick-Style Guitar, by Berklee Press.
In March's guitar lesson, I went over the first study in the book, and now we return and go over the much more challening, 2nd study, titled simply "allegro". This piece is Carcassi's 7th study in his Opus no. 60. The most challenging aspect of this piece is the constant string skipping, made all the more difficult by the brisk 16th note pace at around 120 BPM. There is a lot that can go wrong during this piece, but over time your pick coordination will reach new heights
Above we see a copy of the sheet music taken from the book. If you are truly dead set on tab, then you can find a tabbed version of this piece here that I created using Power Tab. But I hope you will give a shot at learning this piece through sight reading.
I find the best way to play this is to use my pick hand pinky as an anchor against the body, to provide stability. Alternatively, you can keep your wrist in a floating position above the strings, which will be necessary to let open strings ring. Start slow with this one. It will take a while to build this up to speed, but you will be amazed by the newfound command of your pick hand that you will have!
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