Not to worry, Guitaresque has not disbanded. In fact, we can still having our regular practices and jamming sessions at the Divo's home. It's only that I have been totally swarmed by work and other personal commitments and have little time to contribute articles or share my thoughts in this blog.
Still, I am hopeful this will change.. soon!
As a quick udpate:
- The quartet has been faithfully honing our sight-reading skills. We do this by purchasing and reading new scores every couple of weeks. One of the more interesting scores we recently did was "Tokyo Bay Highway" by Hirokazu Sato, one of our fav guitar composers/arrange of late.
This piece is not too difficult to play, but lots of fun! And of course, it sounds great too. We hope to perform this piece soon, maybe along with Andrew York's Pacific Coast Highway!
- Another piece we have been working on is "Baio de Gude", a composition by Paulo Bellinati. This has been in our "closet" for the past couple of years, and we'd all along felt it was too technically/rhythmically challenging for us to play well. But with the years going by (in a flash, I must say!), we seem to have improved our individual technique and understanding of one another's play, so when we took up this song to try again, it was surprisingly not that tough anymore! It would make a nice performance/competition piece, I think...
- We have also dug out the LAGQ's arrangement of the "Carmen Suite" to rework on - as seeing we did not do much justice to some of the more challenging movements in the past, namely Gypsy Dance and Toreadors. This time round, I must say the Gypsies and the Bull fighter are dancing a little more to tempo! Haha.
- Finally, another of LAGQ (York) work that Guitaresque has taken on as a challenge is "Quiccan". This was once an absolute 'out-of-bound' piece, and in many ways, it still represents one of the toughest piece the quartet has ever taken upon to rehearse. It is technically difficult and rhythmically complex as well (just as an example, there are bars of 12/16, 6/16. etc amidst the usual common times of 4/4... haven't seen those time signatures in any other scores, I must admit...See below:)
But once we get the hang of playing some of the parts, and hearing how it all gels together, the song becomes really catchy and intriguing to play! Not that we are anywhere NEAR performing it though... think that will take some work and lots of individual effort to practise!
Here's a clip of the marvelous LAGQ performing this lively song:
That's all for now... will try to keep this blog "alive" if I have time to update.
Cheerios
SH
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