Here’s something I composed on my acoustic guitar some time in the 1980s. I don’t know what you would call it - a prelude, bagatelle, intermezzo. Maybe just etude, since it essentially runs up and down in minor scales. It is called Sevilla.
First, here’s me playing it today on a Fender Strat, neck pickup, through the standard A Coustic patch of my Pocket Master multi-effects:
And just for comparison, here’s a MIDI version I created a couple of years ago (before I decided to take up guitar seriously) with the Orchestral Tools Sine Strand Nylon String Guitar plugin:
I usually struggle to name things, but this one was easy; the piece reminded me so vividly of an evening I spent in Seville. I’d been travelling around Spain on my own. I left my little hotel and wandered out into the warm night at about 10 pm, looking for somewhere to eat. I found a little square full of restaurants, and sat down to aqua con gas, sangria, jamon serrano, tarta helada and coffee. Quiet conversations murmured around me. Someone was playing guitar in the middle of the square. A couple of times a car would try to nose through. Each time the waiters rushed out to move tables aside and clear a path, and the car carried on its way. No one got irritated or made a fuss. Groups of girls passed through the square, calmly placed their handbags on the ground and danced a few flamenco steps to the guitar. The sense of peace was profound.
Interesting. It’s always nice when music is meant to convey some specific feelings, reflections or memories, and this is obviously the case with your little etude (yes, that’s what I would call this particular piece, too). I like the strat version better, but, on the other hand, the nylon string classical is probably closer to the mood of that evening in Sevilla.
I love instrumental compositions of JG users, and always listen to them with pleasure.
I definitely prefer the 2nd version that evokes images of the evening you describe! It’s a lovely little piece & I truly enjoyed it!
The strat version (at least the first half) felt like a prelude to a slow surf rock song… something like Blue Venus played by the Blue Stingrays.
I may be biased though, I absolutely love surf rock… especially the ballad type numbers that I can actually attempt to play!!! BTW, if you like this genre, the Blue Stingrays do some really cool stuff - Surfer’s Life is in my “Dreamers” list!!!
Thanks for the nice comments, guys. And now I know this method of sharing audio works (i.e., streams and doesn’t require an account to listen).
I’m still not sure which version I prefer.
Tod, I had a listen to Blue Venus and I can see what you mean. I never thought of that as a direction to take it. Maybe if I whacked up the tremolo and reverb it would fit right in to the genre.
In fact, though it has been around for years, I never got around to adding other parts or extending this to full song length. I think the passage of time has decreed that it shall remain a one-minute solo piece.
I much prefer the electric version. It makes me curious to find out, where the section would be placed in a song, how it would connect to other parts, what’s the story you want to tell. In contrast the MIDI version just is. It’s a nice etude. That’s it.
Now, try listening to it with fresh ears, it just might be worth to keep working on it after all…
Hans, the older second version was not actually played; it is a manually generated MIDI file, in which I adjusted the timing and velocity of each individual note. Even for such a short piece, that’s quite a lot of work. It’s an indication of the extreme lengths I had to go to to record a guitar piece before I started learning with Justin Guitar. The fact that I can now play this all the way through, though imperfectly, pleases me.
These are indeed questions to which no answers ever arose. It would have to be the introduction, I’m thinking. Maybe then switching to major keys, and back again to minors, would work, as happens in Spanish Romance. Maybe Tod’s notion has merit. I’m content with things as they are though.
Life is in my “Dreamers” list!!!