In this guitar lesson we will look at another great classical guitar piece that adapts well to pick style guitar. The piece is Etude 1 by Heitor Villa Lobos and is a great guitar lesson for building alternate picking coordination and for building chord skills.
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In a previous lesson (Arpeggio Madness) I showed you the opening measures to Villa Lobos's Etude 2. In this Etude, you'll see that there is a constant picking pattern that perpetuates through the entire piece as the piece undergoes a series of great sounding chords. Mastering this piece depends on some extent to mastering the picking pattern.
Above is the tab for this piece. Note that each measure is repeated before moving on to the next. Also note that I have indicated the finger picking pattern as well as the alternate picking pattern. Finger pickers certainly have the advantage since they essentially have 4 picks they can use! But the piece is certainly doable pick style and with enough practice it can be played pick style at the same tempo as most classical players perform it at. And the payoff is enormous, as your alternate picking chops (especially picking intricate patterns that don't involve consecutive notes on the same string) will skyrocket!
In a previous lesson we looked at the first 6 measures of Etude 1. This time around we will look at the next 5 measures. The picking pattern used in these measures is identical to the picking pattern that I showed you in the previous lesson. So if you made good progress on the first 6 measures then you should be in good shape to tackle these next 5.
So far we have gone over the first 11 measures of Heitor Villa Lobos's Etude 1. Based on those 11 measures, you probably wouldn't expect the piece to take the direction that it takes at measure 12. Namely, the piece suddenly breaks into a mesmerizing sounding series of chromatically descending diminished chords that culminate in a great sounding legato riff that preps the next section. What is so great about this section is the continual presence of open strings which adds nicely to the eerie dimished chords.
Above is the tab for measures 12-24. There is not much to it as all you are doing is shifting the same chord fingering down a half step each time. The end is somewhat tricky as it involves a good amount of precise position shifting. In fact, the end of this section is perhaps the toughest of the entire piece.
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