The Art of Classical Guitar
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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...
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...
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...
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...
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!”
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 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...
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...
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I’m Jay Kauffman, a guitarist, teacher, composer, and illustrator. My training is in classical guitar, and I studied performance at the Cincinnati Conservatory and the Juilliard School of Music. I recently moved to Tucson, Arizona, and am seeking to fill my teaching studio both locally and online. I love teaching guitar, all ages and levels. I teach all popular guitar styles (not jazz.) I also teach children and teens.
My highest goal in teaching is to create and hold a space of inspiration, support and challenge in service of your ongoing improvement.
- I offer several stand-alone online courses, including a technique course that is focused on embodied musicianship.
- This is my latest CD, of original classical guitar compositions illustrated by my own watercolors and accompanied by an evolving storyline.
- If you were brought to this site to find the scores for my Youtube recordings of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or Rossini’s William Tell Overture, then click those links if you wish to go straight to them. Here is a full listing of my scores available, including published works.
- Another experiment of mine has been the creation of watercolor bookmarks–please check these out, since you just might love them. My hope, in a world full of screens, is to contribute eye-rest, and the human enjoyment of reading physical books.