Asturias check-in

I’ve been working on Issac Albeniz’s guitar masterpiece Asturias for a few weeks now. It’s been going better than expected, but it’s always a little demorizalizing after realizing that playing the first 15 measures only takes you ~30 seconds into the song.

A few things that worked for me:

• Memorize sections. While it’s certainly possible for someone to sight read the piece, a more amateur player can benefit a lot from removing this variable. Asturias, with its many repeating patterns and measures, is also particularly condusive to memorization to memorization.
• Use the guitar tablature. As far as I can tell, there is exactly one objectively correct way to do the song’s fingering, and the guitar tab will save you from having to figure it out yourself (i.e. as opposed to the version using musical notation).

Currently giving me the most trouble is the triplet section, which starts around 28 seconds into this John Williams rendition. While it sounds like something when I play it, it certainly doesn’t create the beautiful “fluttering” effect that you get from a master.

Although I’m still a lot way out from a complete song, it’s been a fun learning process so far.