In the hands of a great musician, the gloriously simple guitar can create the most complex works of art. Here’s how

In the hands of a great performer, the classical guitar can mesmerise audiences with its beauty, emotional power and subtlety. The 20th century was dominated by the Spanish guitar legend Andrés Segovia, who took the instrument from the salon to the large concert halls of the world, aided in part by developments in guitar-making that produced louder instruments. A later generation included superb players such as John Williams and Julian Bream (sometimes described as the Apollo and Dionysus of interpretation). Other notable virtuosi, including Ida Presti, David Russell, Pepe Romero, Manuel Barrueco, Roland Dyens, Kazuhito Yamashita, and the brothers Sérgio and Odair Assad, have enchanted listeners around the world with their musicianship. In the 21st century, younger players such as Xuefei Yang, Ana Vidović and Gabriel Bianco are reaching new audiences via YouTube and social media.

What’s distinctive about the classical guitar is its simplicity. Ultimately, it’s basically a wooden box with strings attached and a fretted neck, a bridge, a saddle, and tuning pegs. Classical guitar has no inbuilt amplification, and the sounds are produced very directly. While many other instruments are based on that fundamental design, the guitar is simple in that you’re just plucking the strings, as opposed to the relative complexity of bowing a violin, viola or a cello with horsehair that’s been rubbed down with rosin. With the classical guitar, you don’t even use a pick. The sound is created by carefully shaped and maintained fingernails on the plucking hand of the performer, which is overwhelmingly the right hand (many left-handed people play the guitar right-handed).

So there is a glorious simplicity to the guitar, yet that belies a complexity: what’s particularly distinctive about it is that numerous frequently used notes can be played in multiple places on the fretboard.

The top string of the guitar, the one that carries the melody most of the time, is tuned to an E above middle C, and that exact same note exists not just as the open first string, but also on the fifth fret of the second string, the ninth fret of the third string, and the 14th fret of the fourth string – four playable places in all (in principle, there is also a fifth place, as the note can be played on the 19th fret of the fifth string too, but that’s unlikely to be used). It’s the same pitch, the same note and the same note name, but the tonal quality, texture, flavour or quality of the sound differs on each string that is sounded. Middle C on the piano is a single key on the keyboard, while middle C on the guitar exists in three comfortably usable places. It’s found on the first fret of the second string, the fifth fret of the third string, and the 10th fret on the fourth string, and again they have contrasting tonal qualities or richness.

On the guitar, all those notes that can be played in different places have different timbres and they combine differently with other notes that are also replicated in multiple places, to create distinctively different tonal qualities. That’s our palette – it’s what we use to paint music in particular ways on our instrument. Guitarists talk a lot about creating tonal variety, about finding ways of changing the sonic character of the same pitch. Choosing where on the fretboard to play notes and chords has a huge impact on the mood and character of the music being interpreted.

Each positional choice you make produces sounds with a different character

With standard tuning, the bottom five notes on the guitar – E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp – can be played only on the open and first four frets of the sixth string. But once you go above the A at the fifth fret on the sixth string (which is the same pitch as the fifth string played open), we have entered into the world of identical pitches playable in more than one location on the fretboard. The most places you would find any single pitch practically usable on the guitar is in four different positions. For many notes, there are three comfortably possible locations. But when you build chords around those, that means that chords can be voiced or played in multiple different positions as well. Open strings have a different timbre from strings that are stopped, so that’s a factor too.

If you’re sight-reading on the piano, the notes you’re reading can be sounded only by playing one specific key on the keyboard. But the guitar is very different. Each positional choice you make produces sounds with a different character. It’s not infinitely complex, but complex enough. With that comes a fascinating and wide range of expressive possibilities.

So, the guitarist faced with, for instance, a crotchet or a quaver, sees a note at a certain pitch, but that on its own doesn’t determine where to play it. Reading, for example, an E that corresponds to the top E string of the guitar (the top space of the treble clef musical stave), the logical assumption might be that you play this as an open first string. But if, as is commonly the case, you have to play other notes that can be played only on that string at the same time, or overlapping with it, it becomes entertainingly complicated. A whole series of decisions both technical and interpretative come into play. There is a great deal of creative puzzle-solving that goes on when learning a new score.

The guitarist also has to decide how long each note will last. If left to itself, the note will die away, but sometimes performers will stop a note from resonating at a certain point, or may let it sound on for longer than the official duration that’s written into the score. Guitar notation is notoriously vague when it comes to specifying how long certain notes should, or shouldn’t, be sustained. How the notes fade away can be part of the beauty of a performance, as can silences within a piece, or at the very end, after the final note or chord has died away – those few magic seconds before the guitarist looks up to take applause.

The guitar can produce sounds that are bright, tinny, thin, rich, sonorous, percussive, soupy, plummy, sweet, seductive, harsh, and so on – classical guitarists speaking to one another can sound like wine experts who know what they mean by ‘chalky’, ‘fruity’ and ‘cheeky’. These qualities are not just the result of the string and fret choice. The way the guitarist plucks the string matters too, the angle of attack of the fingernail and the strength of the finger movements. There are also two very distinct ways of striking the string, known as rest stroke and free stroke, sometimes referred to using the Spanish terms apoyando and tirando.

The apoyando is richer in tone, and used for emphasis. The tirando is typically lighter and can be nimbler

With a free stroke (tirando), you pass your carefully crafted fingernail across the string, following through above the remaining strings towards the palm of your hand, whereas with a rest stroke (apoyando) you push down into the guitar with the fingertip coming to rest on the adjacent string, so that the string vibrates in a different direction – more up and down rather than straight across the body of the instrument. This typically produces a rounder, richer and usually slightly louder sound that is audibly different from tirando. This is especially noticeable in recordings that, in effect, courtesy of close microphone placements, put the ear of the listener closer to the guitar than would normally be the case in a concert hall. The apoyando or rest stroke is usually richer in tone, and is used for emphasis or accent, often to bring out a line of melody. The tirando or free stroke is typically lighter and can be nimbler. If you listen to a scale played free stroke, and then the same scale played rest stroke, there is an obvious difference: there is a slightly more percussive, less smooth or legato effect to playing scales with repeated rest strokes, an effect often exploited in flamenco and flamenco-influenced music.

When it comes to playing chords, these can be plucked together simultaneously, or arpeggiated (when the notes of a chord are sounded individually, in a rising or descending order); they can be strummed with a thumb or finger, or sounded in more complex rasgueado rhythmic, multi-finger strumming patterns that can also involve slapping the strings with the open hand. Some guitar composers also use pizzicato. For bowed string instruments, pizzicato indicates that the strings are to be plucked rather than bowed – in that sense, the guitar is played pizzicato most of the time. Hence, on the guitar, pizzicato refers to a muffled shortening of notes produced by resting the fleshy side of the palm of the right hand on the strings just inside the bridge to create a staccato note that has a warm popping sound and is used to beautiful contrast in many pieces, such as in the opening passage of the guitar transcription of ‘La Maja de Goya’ (1911) by the Spanish composer Enrique Granados. Some composers also borrow the golpe from flamenco, a technique that requires the performer to strike the top of the guitar with the hand, thumb or fingers, using it like a drum.

Harmonics are another possibility. These are of two kinds. Natural harmonics are produced by the guitarist placing a finger lightly on a string at a node point, eg, at the 12th fret, which sets the string resonating in two halves producing a very beautiful, quiet, distinctive, pure, bell-like note. Natural harmonics can be produced for all strings at the 12th, seventh and fifth frets relatively easily, but they can also work on other frets in the hands of a skilled performer. Then there are artificial harmonics in which the guitarist uses the tip of the first finger on the plucking hand to touch the node while simultaneously plucking the string with the second or third finger or thumb of the same hand. The hand on the fretboard then holds down different notes while the right hand moves to the corresponding nodal point on the string. The combination of natural and artificial harmonics allows guitarists to play melodies entirely in harmonics, often accompanied by gently played bass notes that are not harmonics.

The Romantic French composer Hector Berlioz, who also played the guitar, is supposed to have said: ‘The guitar is a small orchestra,’ a quotation that has also been attributed to the earlier German composer Ludwig van Beethoven. In part, this saying alludes to the guitar’s possibility of playing polyphonic music with several distinct lines, but particularly to the variety of tone colour that the guitarist’s palette offers. And so, when considering timbre and tonal variety on the guitar and where you might choose to play certain phrases, this sense that you have an orchestral range of colours at your disposal courtesy of those six strings of different thicknesses and tensions is important. You can imagine colour bursting out of the instrument with each string having its own shades of a particular hue. And then those colours change as the guitarist’s hand moves around the fretboard.

Melody is that portion of music that people tend to connect with most directly. Very few audience members will go away singing bass lines or accompaniments. Our ears naturally focus, in an orchestral context, on what the first violins often play – lovely soaring melodies, as do some of the wind instruments, but obviously these aspects of instrumentation are fascinatingly variable. On the guitar, our top E string is the equivalent of the first violins in the orchestra: it very often carries the melody. If we think of a popular and well-known tune, such as Stanley Myers’s ‘Cavatina’ (1970) – the theme from the movie The Deer Hunter (1978) – that melody is predominantly on the top string throughout. The melody sings above the accompanying arpeggio with the bass line below.

With a simple piece that consists of melody, accompaniment and bass line, the upper strings and the lower strings tend to perform distinct functions. Melody is usually on the top strings, bass on the bottom, and in the middle you might have some arpeggios or rhythmic figures that provide harmonic context and maintain rhythmic flow and which are subdued in volume compared with the melody and bass.

‘Carbon’ strings have physical qualities that result in a brighter and more projecting tone

The high E string of the guitar, the first string, tends to grab most of an audience’s attention as its key role is frequently melodic. By comparison, the sixth string, tuned to an E two octaves below it, represents the double bass of the orchestra as it carries a lot of the bass lines. In a modern classical guitar, there are also significant tonal differences between the strings, because the top three strings are made of smooth nylon or carbon composite material, while the three lower bass strings are wound with metal.

For centuries, the classical guitar’s strings were made from sheep or cow gut but, since the 1940s, the top three strings began to be made from nylon, with the bottom three strings from a multi-filament nylon core wound in silver-plated copper. For a while, string manufacturers would buy the raw material from fishing-line manufacturers, but treble strings made of fluorocarbon polymers are increasingly popular these days. Ever since 1948, when the string manufacturer Albert Augustine discovered that nylon was an effective alternative to gut, this synthetic substance has been the main material used for the top three strings, right through to the present day. In the 21st century, string-makers started to use a special polymer called polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), also known as fluorocarbon, although string manufacturers commonly refer to them simply as ‘carbon’. What makes these ‘carbon’ strings so special is that they have physical qualities that result in a brighter and more projecting tone. Andrés Segovia played on gut strings for the early part of his career from the 1910s, and that had a distinctive sound – rounder, but also somewhat duller than the nylon strings that he was central to developing with Augustine, and that performers such as Julian Bream and John Williams used in the 1960s when the classical guitar became an extremely popular instrument.

Segovia’s influence over the development of classical guitar-playing was immense, but he used to finger his music in a distinctive way that is now, arguably, less in fashion. If he could choose between playing notes in higher positions, such as the seventh fret, or in a low position closer to the head of the guitar, he tended to play higher on the fretboard. When played on modern guitar strings, many of the pieces in Segovia’s repertoire sound more lyrical and brighter if played in lower positions and, as a consequence, performing guitarists today often use quite different fingerings from those that Segovia wrote into his printed scores.

Sometimes, the distinctive sound of the lower strings is exploited by composers who write melodies using the metal-wound fourth, fifth and sixth strings. The orchestral analogy is a good one because there are many instances in musical history where the cellos in particular (which you could say are loosely represented by the fourth and fifth strings on the guitar) are given rich and prominent melodies to play. A particularly good example of this, well known to many guitarists, would be Prelude No 1 (1940) by Heitor Villa-Lobos, which opens with an extended passage of melody that uses the fifth and fourth strings, supported by a bass note on the sixth string, with accompaniment chords played on the top three treble strings. Here, the typical structure of music with which we started is inverted. The sustained melody is now on the richly resonating bass, and the accompaniment is in the treble.

A virtuoso guitarist is fully aware of all these things going on simultaneously, and will adjust, as a matter of personal interpretation, the tone colour for a particular passage, perhaps by varying repeated material (‘Never play the same thing the same way twice’ is one of our popular maxims) or just by the use of tonal variety to characterise certain passages of music. It is very common to play something in a low position and then, if you have to play the same passage again in a repeat or echo, to finger it in a higher position, to produce a warmer, richer version of it.

One other particularly potent tool available to guitarists is to play close to the bridge on the guitar, which is called sul ponticello, or away from the bridge (sul tasto), sometimes also referred to as dolce (sweet). The tonal contrasts that can be created by plucking near the bridge or away from it are greater on the classical guitar than on any other instrument. With bowed instruments, you can also play near the bridge, which is squeakier and lighter, or produce a richer, fuller timbre away from the bridge but, with the guitar, the effect is more pronounced. Bream was a great exponent of this type of tonal contrast.

With some musical instruments, it is quite easy to change dynamics – how loudly or softly the performer plays. The guitar is not the easiest of instruments in this respect, and one of the most pervasive criticisms of student guitarists is a lack of dynamic variety. The received opinion about the guitar is that it has a more compact dynamic range than many of the instruments that we listen to in the classical world, which also largely explains its absence in the vast bulk of orchestral repertoire as it cannot effectively compete with the volume produced by most orchestral instruments individually, let alone when they are playing together.

The guitar that I usually play, built by the Australian guitar-maker Greg Smallman, was designed to produce more resonance and volume than guitars built earlier in the 20th century. Its design allows a wider dynamic range than many more traditional instruments, and it goes some way to negating the need for amplification, though I do sometimes use amplification, particularly when playing in ensembles with louder instruments such as the piano, saxophone, accordion, or in chamber groups with mixed instrumentation.

This simple instrument embodies almost limitless expressive possibilities – we literally sculpt with sound

The challenge on the guitar is to create the impression of a large dynamic range by sometimes playing pianissimo (very, very quietly) – in fact, the guitar can be played incredibly quietly and to great effect – and then also to exploit the full resources of the instrument to achieve the dramatic impact of playing fortissimo (very loud!) It’s just a question of what is musically appropriate, and is also partially determined by the acoustics of the venue. Performers tend to gauge this once we’re in a space, while also feeding off the audience response as we play. The wonderful thing about quieter dynamics on any instrument, but particularly on an instrument as intimate as the guitar, is that you can really draw the listeners in, make them almost literally lean forward to hear. But the guitar can be played aggressively too, creating a huge dramatic impact with the impression of substantial volume, sometimes with the aid of percussive effects (hitting or slapping the guitar) or using what’s known as Bartók pizzicato, where the string is pulled away and then released to slap aggressively against the fretboard.

When an experienced performer blends these different techniques, the audience may be moved by the beauty, rightness and subtlety of the result without necessarily being aware of the choices the guitarist has made. In the hands of a great musician, this simple instrument embodies expressive possibilities that are almost limitless – we literally sculpt with sound.

I have spent many hours of my life with my guitar and don’t regret a second of that. In practice, toying with the full palette of colours the guitar has to offer brings immense pleasure and individualises interpretations of even the best-known pieces. Having the opportunity to entertain people and strive to make them feel what I feel about the music I play is a great privilege.