Blog
Positively Dangerous 2.0 is open for enrollment
I’m thrilled to offer the newest, updated, improved, and streamlined version of Positively Dangerous on the Classical Guitar. Not enough word has gotten out about this course, so I am moving the starting session to January 27, 2023. Last summer’s pilot course was a wonderful time! Students experienced huge improvements and breakthroughs, while I learned a great deal about what worked well and what needed improvement. Click here to find out more, and ask me any questions you have!
Jarabi (Passion)
Here's my performance-ready version of this amazing endless melody of a piece. I've been enjoying Derek Grippers arrangements of Kora music for classical guitar for years, and finally got a chance to try some of them out. Someone once said (I forgot who) that it's...
What Can You Change When You Can’t Change the Notes?
New classical guitar video on creative interpretation. In this video I play the same piece 5 or 6 completely different ways, and show you how you can experiment with this too.
How do you manage to practice a piece of music that many times and still not go crazy?
When you are learning a piece of music, you have to play it hundreds of times. Over, and over. And over again. The same notes, the same chords, the same fingerings. In one life, you might play the same set of notes tens of thousands of times. I haven’t done the...
Learning Repertoire: Jarabi Runthrough
This is a follow-up to last week's video on "finishing" learning a challenging piece of music. In this video I run through Jarabi, the arrangement by South African guitarist and composer Derek Gripper of Toumani Diabate's amazing Kora version. I have the piece...
How Do You “Finish” Learning a Piece of Music?
Once you can play something well enough that it's fun to run through, the temptation is to stop practicing it and just play it over and over. Here is one method I use to keep myself focused on mastering repertoire up until the time it's actually ready to perform....
Announcing a New Online Course
This 6-part interactive pilot course is designed to help you break through limitations and master the best, fastest, and most musical ways to learn the pieces you most want to play. By joining the course and doing the work seriously, you will be getting two-plus months of carefully designed coursework on the most powerful ways I’ve found to transform your playing…
Classical Guitar Repertoire Reading: Guardame las Vacas by Luis de Narvaez
Read up on Luis de Narvaez at his Wkipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_de_Narv%C3%A1ez This deservedly well-known work the first known written example of the musical form "variations on a theme." It's always been one of my favorite pieces! The theme upon...
Is Practicing Slowly Really the Fastest Way To Learn A Piece of Music?
I'm starting up a series of posts on how to become positively dangerous on the classical guitar. Much of what I talk about will apply not just to classical guitar, but to all styles of guitar playing and to musicianship, practice and mastery in general.I want to...
Classical Guitar Music: Simbi (Haitian Dance) by Frantz Casseus
Frantz Casseus (1915-1993) was a Haitian classical guitarist who move to New York City in 1946. Many of his pieces derived elements from the music of his homeland, including this gorgeous piece. His complete works have been edited by Mark Ribot and published by...
Classical Guitar Music: Matteo Carcassi, Etude No. 6–Allegretto Grazioso
Yes, I know that these "daily" classical guitar repertoire readings are not actually daily. Sue me. I do read through repertoire a lot, simply for the joy of it, the curiosity of it. As. result of spending so much time in my life eagerly "reading music," I've gotten...
Working Through the Waves
This is a Last Minute Concert Announcement for New Yorkers Are you musically adventurous? If you are in the New York area, and are into interesting, beautiful, creative music, go hear this concert at the historic Old Stone House in Brooklyn. There are two...
Classical Guitar Music: Moto Perpetuo by Jay Kauffman
Occasionally I'll be sneaking in some repertoire by yours truly, because yes, I am a composer who loves to compose. This one is part of a set of 5 short preludes, and I'm particularly proud of it. I set forth writing it as an exercise in pull-offs and hammer-ons...
Classical Guitar Music: A Rondo by Matteo Carcassi
Matteo Carcassi wrote a lot of charming little short pieces, and here is one that I've not heard many people play. It's so short that it's not even really a Rondo---the main theme only comes back one time. Its form is basically A-B-A. I found it in an obscure...
Classical Guitar Music: El Testament D’Amelia by Miguel LLobet
This is a famously beautiful arrangement of a Catalan folk song, by Romantic Era guitarist/composer Miguel Llobet. He wrote/arranged a set of 13 such songs, and this is probably the most famous one, frequently played as an encore. One of the most lovely special...
Classical Guitar Music: Aire de Milonga by Jose Luis Merlin
If you want to be tunely, practice afternoonly. I have to admit something. I haven't been practicing as much as I would like. I haven't been practicing afternoonly. In fact, I haven't been practicing regularly at all lately. I love practicing, and I love playing. It's...
Classical Guitar Music: Aire de Estilo, by Jose Luis Merlin
There is a whole lot of music sitting around in my studio, and I love nothing more than to rifle through it, find something that suits my inclination for the day, and start reading it. Daily sight-reading is a great idea for developing your skills as a...
Archipelago for Guitar
CD with original artwork available for streaming and purchase at Bandcamp: Music is everywhere these days, but listening to it is getting harder. Classical music– and all serious “listening” music—-hails from a time before app-driven dopamine hits ruled our...
William Tell Overture for Solo Guitar
This is my arrangement of the full finale (the famous part) of the William Tell Overture for solo classical guitar. Mauro Giuliani, the accomplished 19th century guitarist-composer wrote a number of “Rossinianes,” virtuosic potpourris into which he threw many of the...
How To Practice Guitar: The Magic of Quality over Quantity
At the core of learning to play the guitar well is the quality of time you spend with it. A lot has been said about quantity–about the 10,000 hours of practice you need in order to reach mastery. And about how to organise each of those 10,000 hours. These are both important. But the quality of that time is more important.
The Learning Zone
The book “Talent is Overrated” makes the claim that a specific manner of practicing, called “deliberate practice” is what separates the W.A. Mozarts or Tiger Woods of the world from everyone else is something he calls “deliberate practice.”
Here are the elements of Deliberate Practice:
1. It’s designed specifically to improve performance—designed very specifically, for exactly what needs improvement at the specific stage of development.
The Classical Guitarist With No Bad Habits
Have you heard the legend of the guitarist with no bad habits?
It goes like this: “there was this guy, who my friend used to go to school with, a monster guitarist, who’d been taught so well as a child that he never developed any bad habits!”
Picking (or Picking On) Your Classical Guitar Teacher
10th Year Anniversary Edition:I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! What should you look for when considering classical guitar lessons? What should you hope for? What might you have to settle for? Every teacher has something valuable to...
Why are Classical Guitarists so OBSESSED with their Left Hand
10th Year Anniversary Edition:I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! This is really a post about chasing windmills....and conquering the universe. I want to start of this post with a disclaimer. I have a theory about why classical...
What’s holding you back as a guitarist?
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Memorizing Repertoire On the Classical Guitar: Method to the Madness?
10th Year Anniversary Edition:I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! Although many things we do require skill, there's really nothing in everyday life even remotely like learning, memorizing, and performing a piece of music. Where else in...
Mini Classical Guitar Lesson: Finding the “seed” of your mistake
10th Year Anniversary Edition:I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! In this post, I'm elaborating on a useful metaphor I used in my last post. Simply put, it's this: "Practicing is Editing" FIlm editors, as far as I can surmise, put a lot...
The Yin and Yang of Classical Guitar Mastery
10th Year Anniversary Edition: I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! I've been thinking a lot lately about some of my most recent discoveries in guitar playing and teaching. My work with polarities, going deeper into how they effect life...
Learning Classical Guitar: Why Do You Play Classical Guitar Anyways?
10th Year Anniversary Edition:I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! There are thousands of ways to play guitar, and most of them aren't "classical," by any stretch of the imagination. Why would anyone choose to play classical guitar in...
Music Theory? Why Should I Care?
I still mumble and stumble a bit with music theory terminology, but that’s because my inclination has always been towards the feeling side of things. I think in the language of feelings, not jargon. I always ask myself, in a very visceral sense, what does this bit of theory mean, in terms of how the music sounds, in terms of how it feels? So why should you care about music theory? What does it do for you? And what does it not do for you?
The True Instrument You Must Learn (according to Dr. Firgus-Fortuna Zelfrumzinger Bones)
10th Year Anniversary Edition:I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! When you learn to play an instrument like the classical guitar there's plenty to worry about. Your hand position.Your other hand position.Coordinating your hands (and your...
Learning Music Theory on the Guitar is Just Crazy
When you panic at the complexity of the fingerboard, you may think that what you have to memorize are a bunch of individual notes and chords, so you can jump to the right one at the right time. That’s true, but on a deeper level, what you really need to learn is the deeper musical shapes those notes follow. And these shapes have a lot more humanity to them, they are what we respond to emotionally, and thus they tend to be easier to learn. They have their full power because of the musical scale from which they spring.
How to Play Classical Guitar without Dysfunctional Tension
10th Year Anniversary Edition: I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! ——Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor! I’m not a tendinitis expert! If you have lingering pain or some other issue with your hands that really concerns you , and just doesn’t...
How to Integrate Your Technique with Natural Musical Expressiveness: A Video Lesson on Villa-Lobos Etude 1
10th Year Anniversary Edition:I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! If you really want others to enjoy what you play, you need to be enjoying yourself. They call it self-expression, but how can you fully express yourself if you aren't...
Is There One Absolute “Best-in-the-universe” Classical Guitar Method?
10th Year Anniversary Edition:I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! Yes. And no. It really depends on how you are asking this question. Some of the Classical Guitar Methods out there are definitely more comprehensive, more well thought...
What Do Bedbugs Have to Do With How You Learn Classical Guitar?
10th Year Anniversary Edition:I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! Summer has just ended here in New York city but the mosquitoes are still around, along with plenty of other critters whose natural inclination it is to deliver little...
Breaking Through The Technical Obsession Barrier
10th Year Anniversary Edition:I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! Playing classical guitar is technically demanding. There are a lot of hurdles even if you want to play a relatively simple piece well enough for it to be satisfying. The...
The Tao of Technique
The Tao of Technique Free videos from the Basic Classical Guitar Mastery Series These free videos are all excerpted from a course that you can find at my teaching site, Artofguitar.net.If these videos make you curious, check out these links:Basic...
Classical Guitar Tips
Classical Guitar Tips This is the collection of videos that got me started on youtube. Everything on here still holds true, and is often really helpful and entertaining as well. I’ve had many requests to go back to this format for my teaching videos—-short,...
Knocking “eye-to-hand coordination” Off Its Pedestal.
10th Year Anniversary Edition:I'm revisiting some of my best old posts on playing guitar. Enjoy! I've been thinking about about the difference between what I say here on this blog, and how I actually teach most of the time. In a guitar lesson, we're working on...
Archipelago for Guitar
Not too long ago, I had the idea to weave a storyline into the performance of a series of guitar pieces. Each piece I wrote seemed to have its own musical ecosystem, so I called them "islands." Narrating a tale while tuning the guitar between "islands" would draw the...
Bookmark Shop
The many benefits of bookmarks for all your books: Bookmarks are Beautiful. Bookmarks are Fun. Bookmarks are Elegant. Bookmarks inspire you to read more good books and keep your place in them with pleasure, for years at a time. Bookmarks never run out of batteries....
A Tour of the Island of Milonga
I love using video to wander around within a painting. In this painting of the island of Milonga I wanted to create the sense of being in a guitarist's paradise, a world where the music I grew up listening to and playing is magically alive in the architecture and even...
Milonga for Solo Guitar
This is a live performance of Milonga, the first “island” in my Archipelago for Guitar, performed at the “Piano Lunch” concert at Christ & St. Stephen’s Church, New York, NY.
Island Three (Live)
This is the third movement of Archipelago for Guitar., recorded live at the MakeMusic Harlem Festival
Listen to Paganini’s Romanze in A Minor
This has always been one of my favorite classical guitar pieces. It's the middle movement of Paganini's Grand Sonata in A Major, which was originally written for guitar and violin. Most of his works for guitar and violin had virtuosic violin parts, and relatively...
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for Solo Guitar
All 4 movements of Serenade No. 13 for Strings, K. 525, transcribed for the advanced classical guitar, from G Major into D Major. If you're a bit burned out on Sor and Giuliani and their ilk, it's a lot of fun to play a great composer such as Mozart on the guitar. A...
Five Preludes
Prelude 1: Lullaby from a Paper Boat / Prelude 2: With Variation / Prelude 3: Brookrolick / Prelude 4: Like a Passacaglia / Prelude 5: Moto Perpetuo
Riverside Park 3
Riverside Park 2
Riverside Park 1
Ordering a Signed Print
Below is an unsigned print of Island Two, Bossa Paraiso. The prints are done at Tribeca Printworks. It's a small, friendly business in downtown Manhattan. I work with them on getting things just right. When correcting colors and levels and adjusting these to the paper...
Island 10: Freedom Song
Diving
Fingerprint: Guitar Solos
CD available for streaming and purchase at Bandcamp: Fingerprint is a musical tour of the world through the strings of Jay Kauffman’s guitar. It is a refreshingly original collection of music inspired by folk and popular idioms from around the globe. It features some...
Valentine Sunday Concert at Bartow-Pell Mansion
I will be playing some romances, romanzas, capriccios, valses, zambas, chacareras, carnavalitos, and a Beatles set. Plus a dramatic & romantic story-set-vignette from my own piece, Archipelago for Guitar!* Please note: Valentine's day is a Wednesday,...
Island Nine
Island 8: Dream Lullaby Prints Available
Island 7 Prints Available
Island 6 Prints Available
island 5: Opala Kevrali Prints Available
Island Four, Tiento Prints Available
Island Four Painting In Progress
The music excerpt is Xuefei Yang (guitarist) playing The Andante from Bach's Violin Concerto, BWV 1040. Elias String Quartet supports her.
Pics from an Exhibition (Music too!)
This concert, put on by Composer's Concordance, happened a while ago (in April), but I wanted to share it with you because now I have some videos! I've included pics of the art show as well, which was very well-recieved. I will add a few more videos of ensemble works...
Island at the Edge of the Sea
A bit of piano-tickling from Glenn Gould never hurt anyone.... I am trying to keep somewhat mum about the narrative content of the Archipelago story, but it's hard to hide some things if they are in the paintings, which are visible to all. The third island in this...
Dream Lullaby
Here's the video from my performance of the 8th Island in my Archipelago for Solo Guitar. It was done at the Composer's Concordance 8th Annual Composers Play Composers Marathon. It's a lullaby that takes place in a dream, hence the title, Dream Lullaby. Most of the...
April 22 Composers Concordance Concert will also feature Jay Kauffman Paintings and Prints, Sigur Ros…and Foot Tambourine
Here's what you need to know about this concert: I get to play some Sigur Ros (one of my favorite bands) I get to play foot tambourine. I get to have my prints and paintings shown. Also, it will be exciting and entertaining concert, packed with adventurous, fun music...
Performance on May 4, 2017–Island 8 (Dream Lullaby)
I'm honored to be playing at the Composers-Play-Composers marathon this Saturday. The program is from 7 PM to 10 PM. There will be a plethora of great musicians and really cool music! Hope you can make it! I'm second on the program, so come early or at least on time...
How To Make A Guitar-Powered Boat
First you have to design it. What does it need? Definitely a treble clef or two, a guitar, a guitar player....perhaps a mast made out of an eighth-note? Or....you could try building the mast out of a guitar fretboard instead! And definitely add a sail! Maybe the sail...
The 997 Siren Islands of Bossa Paraiso
This is the second adventure of our guitar hero, in which he passes through the 997 islands of Bossa Paraiso. He's left his home, the Island of Milonga. He's on his way to the Last Island before he launches his tiny boat into the unknown of the Sea of Song. I wrote a...
Mastering Right Hand Technique: Right Hand Position and Movement
This video is from my online technique course, Basic Classical Guitar Mastery. Video Number Four introduces to all of the most basic, important points about how, where and why classical guitarists position our right hands as we do. This is an excerpt of a longer video...
Right and Left Hand Technique: The Workhorse and the Voice of the Guitar
This video is from my online technique course, Basic Classical Guitar Mastery. Video Number Three introduces you to the obvious differences between the left and right and, as well as the less obvious but equally important commonalities. The course is over 40 videos...
Mastering Left Hand Technique: Left Hand Leverage
This is a video excerpted from my online technique course, Basic Classical Guitar Mastery. Video Number Two gives you one of the hidden keys to Left Hand leverage and a powerful left hand technique The course is over 40 videos long, It's designed to rebuild and refine...
All That Supports Your Technique: Why How You Hold the Guitar is So Important
This is a video from online technique course, Basic Classical Guitar Mastery, . The course is over 40 videos long, It's designed to rebuild and refine your basic technique from the ground up. If you're a beginner, then much of the material will serve to set you up on...
Video Course: How To Conquer Technical Hurdles
This course is jam-packed with creatively filmed and entertainingly edited demonstrations of all the fundamentals of basic classical guitar technique. I present them in a way that is intended to upload as much knowledge as I can—knowledge that I’ve struggled for...
Allegro from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (Revised 2015 Version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyKOgWtBwsY This Allegro has still been flying off the virtual shelves at $7. This edition features a revised version of the Allegro that includes a few changes that elegantly eliminate some tricky tempo bottlenecks. (I still include...
Jay Kauffman Classical Guitar Recital at Bartow-Pell Mansion
Click here for maps and transportation info to the mansion September 20 at 4:30 PM Tickets $20 895 Shore Road Pelham Bay Park Bronx, New York 10464 718.885.1461 [mashshare] The recital takes place in a lovely period room with great acoustics. It fits about 50 people,...
Rondo from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
This is a full arrangement of the Rondo for advanced players. This is perhaps the most difficult movement to perform on the classical guitar. But it does sound fantastic and is worth the effort needed to learn, memorize---and then work it up to a decent...
Menuet from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
This is a full arrangement of the Menuet, for intermediate to advanced players. This is the easiest movement to transcribe for classical guitar, but I've been careful to create a lively and nuanced arrangement that would be welcome on any concert stage in the hands of...
Romanze from Eine Kleine Nachmusik
This is a full arrangement of the Romanze, for advanced players. It's quite amenable to the classical guitar...but the third section was a special challenge to transcribe, with it's call/answer figurations between the high and low voices while at the same time...
Archipelago
I'm exploring an extended group of Islands that have been hidden from Google Maps due to their aural nature. The musical ecology I have found so far in this journey seems to draw its inspiration from many parts of the globe. And yet each island in this hitherto hidden...
Mini Classical Guitar Lesson: Right Hand Technique
I have been getting some really interesting questions in response to my poll from those who've joined my list recently. Right now I'm in Amish Country for my Kauffman family reunion, driving past quilt shops and horse-and-buggies, but wanted to answer a question or...
One of the Worst Mistakes that Guitarists Make (and how to start fixing it yourself)
I my last post I sort of left you hanging: Here's how it ended: There’s one basic polarity that seems to yield such a huge effect and has so many repercussions that one of my students sent me a long email about how much her experience of practicing had changed after...
