Song List: Aura Lee Beautiful Dreamer Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair Black Sunday Darling Nellie Gray Hard Times, Come Again No More I Dream of Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair In The Pines Johnny Has Gone For a Soldier Just A-Wearyn' for You Just Before The Battle, Mother Land of Rest Lorena Mighty Lak' A Rose Paper Of Pins Prairie Sunset Pretty Peggy � O Shady Grove Shenandoah The Lonesome Dove The Long Road The Old Country The Old Homestead TO a Wild Rose Trail Of Tears

This collection contains sixty easy Renaissance pieces from various European countries, and from works of well known, but also obscure or anonymous composers, transcribed for the classical guitar mainly from lute, vihuela, and bandore sources. The pieces will be published in three volumes, each volume containing twenty pieces.
I have tried to include pieces of varied difficulty in all three volumes and also to keep the upper level of technical difficulty to the contemporary grade IV level of the A.B.R.S.M. which takes the student to the intermediate level (grades IV-VI).
The pieces in each volume are given in two versions, first as decorated pages in ordinary notation, and then the same pieces are again given in undecorated pages of notation and tablature. Therefore each volume contains two books in one and the choice is left to the user whether to keep the volume as presented, or to construct his own book by inclusion or deletion of unwanted pages, blank pages, etc, for use either as a printed or a tablet-screen book version. The addition of tablature of course results in doubling the number of pages needed for the presentation of the pieces, therefore the staff sizes are here reduced to an appropriate degree which can maintain the two-page view principle of any piece without need for automatic or manual page turners, foot pedals etc.
The inclusion of tablatures which shows a preference for open string combinations whenever that is possible, clarifies sufficiently the left hand playing positions without need for additional fingerings.
Having said that, my professional advice to all guitar students is to abandon completely their reliance on tablatures and study seriously through many easy collections of music such as the present one in order to familiarise themselves to all aspects of musical notation. And always have in mind that tablatures were invented and still are in use only for fretted instruments, and only due to commercial (publisher?s) considerations primarily, while other string instrumentalists neither have them available, nor need them in order to study/play music.

Metronome marks are only suggestions that need not be taken too literally and are placed mainly for guiding a score writer programme such as Sibelius for performance and extraction of audio and video files. To this end many other expression and/or technique and tempo marks may have been added to the score and made invisible.

NAVIGATION INDEXES ? External and Internal links

The second page in every volume is an index divided into three columns. The first column has the titles of the pieces as active invisible links which take the user to the relevant tablature page. The header of that page brings the user back to this index.
The second column has visible links (in frames) to live performances of the pieces either by professional guitarists or students, which are only for getting familiar with the music, but not as suggestions that particular performances should be followed for study purposes.
The third column contains active links to information about particular composers, found mainly in Wikipedia, but sometimes also in other external sources.
The third page in every volume contains a thematic index of active links to the decorated (without tablatures) pages of the pieces. The header of every decorated page brings the user back to this index.
Finally, the titles of all decorated and tablature pages are active links of interconnection between these pages.

This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard?s global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.

A Flamenco guitar solo in the Tarantas style. The Tarantas is a free-flowing slow moving Fandango from the region of Almeria which was earlier a principal mining region of Spain. The style is therefore sometimes called Mineras. Tarantas has long been one of my favorite Flamenco pieces for the guitar. It is notated in the key of B minor, based on a so-called ?Andalusian? cadence consisting of the chords B minor - A major (open B and E) - G major (open B and E) - F# major (with open G, B, and E). These dark and indefinite sounding chords allow plenty of room for the guitarist to open up emotionally with the audience.The material for the piece consists mostly of traditional themes that I have woven into a compositional whole along with a few of my own creations (falsetas). Songs for Tarantas are often expressions of loss of a loved-one in some mining tragedy. The long legato passages demand a complete mastery of the technique and should be played as fluidly as possible. The fanning (abanico) rasqueados in the finish of the piece can be new to guitarists coming to Flamenco from classical guitar. Demonstrations of this type of rasqueado can be found at my YouTube sites: https://youtu.be/sB-rDGtXK34 and https://youtu.be/OVBbUZFIj2s. Another type of rasqueado used frequently in the piece is a soft four finger rasqueado (cami) preceded by and followed by a brush up and down over the strings with the thumb (p-camip), accompanied by legatos on the base strings.The piece is accessible for advanced intermediate to advanced guitarists. As the Tarantas is played sens mesure, not demanding any competence of special flamenco rhythms, it is also a flamenco piece readily playable by classical guitarists. Classical guitarists should however be aware that the thumb plays the dominant role even in the more melodic passages.