How hard to press down on the fretboard?

Right, I wasn’t suggesting we don’t need any tension. I just know what I’ve felt. When I play things on my classical guitar I can be very relaxed and I feel the weight of my arm assisting with the fretting. The strings don’t really stretch the same way they do on electric and I don’t feel I need secondary force to counter pulling downward.
This is a different experience than if I have the guitar, an electric especially, parallel to my body.

Again I am not saying this gets me out of pressing with the fingers I just feel like I press less when I have the arm weight and shoulder pulling down. It is also highly possible that what I feel is not what’s really happening :slight_smile:

This is what I’ve ended up doing. My original point wasn’t that the difference is impossible to manage, but merely that the difference exists.

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This reminds me of the concepts of “head voice” and “chest voice” in singing. There are physiological explanations for the cavity shaping and laryngeal function that go into getting vocal “registers” to work, but “it makes my face vibrate” versus “it doesn’t make my face vibrate” is a useful shorthand for helping singers recognize and reinforce a mechanism they will want to be able to command even without fully understanding all the details of how it works.

I’ve never seen any classical guitarist hold the guitar at an angle from their body, they do however don’t hold it against their body. I think an angle would be bad, especially for the wrists being put into a more knife edge position which is a recipe for tendonitis and you end up having to hold the neck which you shouldn’t have to do either.

The reality is that - yes, trained classical players will position the guitar so the back is as free to resonate as possible. It may not appear that they’re doing so - but in profile they usually are. It’s quite subtle.

A classical guitar is so lightweight, and fretting nylon strings takes so little effort.

That also means sustain can be hard to come by. Anything touching the front or back will affect resonance. The neck is also tilted way up, so wrist angle isn’t as much of an issue as you might expect…

This is sort of funny. I was about to post a pic of the first classical guitarist I could think of showing how obvious this is. Actually, you aren’t wrong. You’ve probably never seen any classical guitarist do this. I had more trouble finding ones that did than those who seem to hold it pretty straight.

I was trained in the classical technique by Julian Gray of the Peabody Conservatory. It’s a world renowned conservatory (not quite Juliard, but up there) and he’s very respected, particularly for his tone production, and that was the basis of everything he showed me - how to coax the best possible sounds from the instrument. He did instruct me to angle the guitar away from my body with the explanation that I needed to keep the back of the instrument free to resonate.

I should point out (and no judgement here at all) that if someone is just a ‘casual’ classical guitar fan/player, this stuff isn’t on their radar. The training I received was with the thought that I’d go on to become someone who performs classical guitar for a living and there are considerations that the general guitar public (even ones interested in elite guitarists like close to 100% of us here are) just doesn’t think about. Also, unless these considerations are done on a high quality very resonant instrument, it’s highly possible there would be no difference if you let the back of the instrument touch your body or not. If a guitar isn’t built in a way that allows a high amount of resonance from the back…then stopping that resonance (that isn’t very present to begin with) won’t make much difference. My instrument, while nothing to brag about in relative terms, was hand built by a regionally respected classical guitar luthier and I could definitely hear a pronounced difference on my guitar if I didn’t angle it away from me. I paid $2K for it in the year 2000. Julian told me I’d purchased a nice instrument. He told me his cost $10K, just for perspective :slight_smile: You may not notice any difference if you walk into a guitar center and try one of their mass produced ‘classical’ guitars. They aren’t necessarily built with the intent of giving public performances in a small concert venue, no mic used.

Anyway, here’s a video of Julian where it’s clear that he’s angling the instrument away from himself.

Here’s an image of Manuel Barrueco, another Peabody guy and there’s a clear tilt

Here’s Christopher Parkening (my favorite ‘tone’ guy of the genre) - tilted

David Russell (considered by many the “best” we have, alive today) - tilted

So that’s me cherry-picking data :slight_smile: and now you can’t say you’ve never seen ‘any’ classical guitarists do this. I’ll gladly eat my words and walk back any sentiment that they ‘all’ do this. I’d honestly never given it much thought and just done things the way Julian taught me, assuming since he was a prominent instructor in a realm where technique doesn’t vary that much, that’s what everyone else did too.

In fairness, here’s John Williams, regarded as the supreme technician of classical guitar. He has great tone also…looks like he holds the guitar pretty ‘straight’ and looks quite different from the rest. I found plenty of others who hold the instrument like he does.

And finally, since I’m constantly trying to market the music of Barrios in hopes to make the world a better place, here’s an assortment of artists, all varying degrees of the ‘tilt’ (or in some cases, the absence of a tilt).

To keep it back on topic, there’s plenty examples in this video of ways to press just hard enough. I’ve played some of these pieces and they are brutal on the left hand. If you don’t do it the ‘right’ way (or at least, not too much of the wrong way lol), you can’t get through the pieces.

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Great comment @joebegly .

I once saw an interview with a classical guitar builder (supposedly one of the best). He said something to the effect that in an ideal classical guitar, the back should be a reflector only and have minimal resonance, thereby having little to no effect on the overall tone.

Classical guitar technique is not my area of expertise and I know almost nothing about classical guitar luthiery, so I can’t comment on that, but I thought it was very interesting.

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It’s possible! I don’t really know tons about the building of classical guitars. I do know that in a John Williams documentary he met with his builder and he mentions that he thinks the build is due for a reevaluation. It’s clear from what they are discussing that the overall sound has more to do with the top (we’ll say ‘front’ since before I talked of the ‘back’). Maybe the interview you’re referencing is more pronounced in more expensive builds? Or maybe technology is moving forward, as Williams was hoping, and this is a better way.

Now, I just pulled my classical out (I don’t play it much these days) and I tried playing intentionally with the back against my body. I can feel it vibrating and the difference in sound as I bring it away from myself is pretty obvious. The best analogy I can think of is if you put a blanket over a speaker and gradually removed it. There’s a clarity and volume difference that’s easy to hear. Again, my instrument isn’t very expensive as far as these guitars go. I have a very nice Taylor acoustic, a steel string, and I notice it with this too, but it isn’t quite as pronounced as what happens on my classical.

The other thing I noticed, that has me reevaluating some things is that I don’t need to angle the instrument away from myself as much as I do by default to get what sounds like the same tonal benefit to me. There’s a place where that muffled sound leaves and once you pass that, I don’t detect much difference. In this reduced angle, that ‘weight’ I’d mentioned to you in my first post is not present at all and I have to use my hands/fingers more to fret the notes. Again, I was never claiming the ‘weight’ did all the work, just that it helped slightly. It’s possible I’m pulling with my back and/or shoulder slightly and that’s what helps and gravity has nothing to do with it. So, maybe it’s all in my head :slight_smile:

Does anyone here educated on the topic know whether it’s appropriate to think about the back of an acoustic guitar like the bottom head on a drum?