3 simple steps to play cleaner! 

hahaha well, no worries, the videos will stay here for you, they are not going anywhere! :D I'm trying to bring some useful content for the classical guitar community here so feel free to share it with other players who might enjoy it, that will help my work so so much! 🙏🏻😊

thank you so much for your kindness and generosity!!!

Glad to hear that!

Happy to help!

Thanks a lot! really appreciate you do! :)

Muchas gracias Gary!!!! Me alegra poder ayudaros! 😊

And very important to control at a certain level!!! :D

Thanks! 😃

Glad you like them!

You're so very welcome! 🙌🏻

Wonderful! Wish you lots of fun with this practice! crossing fingers you dont have to deal with a too big mes... hahahah🤗

😊✌🏻

Thanks a lot Pukka! That's so nice of you! :)

Great!

09/13/2022 actual understand and practiced with sound musicality- great for first chair guitar early learning study.Thank You Maestro

Grazie mille Davide!!! 🙏🏻

@@MerceFont 👍

hahahhaha nice one Tim! Wish you happy practicing then! Hope this will help you for all the crazy giuliani bass lines! 🤓

I'm sure you can do it! It might feel odd at first but once you have tried it several times you'll see how is not so hard to do. It becomes quite tricky when the piece you are playing is rather fast and involves complex damping combinations. Next video I'll show many other variations that you might encounter and solutions you might need to use :)

Oh cool! I can imagine he included that, is a pretty essential concept to know :) I'll look it up and see if I can find any digital version of William Kanengiser videos, I love his work!

Thanks for the sub!

@@MerceFont Absolutely you are such a great player. Who did you study with? Where? I myself studied with Dr. Micheal Quantz from The University of Texas

@@TruthGuitar aw thanks a lot for your kind words! I studied with Carlo Marchione and Goran Krivokapic :) Do you know them?

@@MerceFont wow!!! I know Goran, I doubt he knows me. He actually came to my University to Perform and I played a Theme and Variations piece for him in a Master class. Great player!! You are well set!!! Wow amazing

Thanks Tudor! Glad it was valuable! :) My guitar is made of spruce (top) and rosewood (sides and back) :)

Hi Arthur! nice question here! Well you can certainly use apoyando for the situation you describe, but in fast pieces (or in situations like you have some arpeggios going on, on the top voices, just to name one hypothetical situation) it is not really possible to play apoyando (or very difficult/uncomfortable), so you'd better think of the movement as if you were going to play the string in free stroke but then you just touch it and go away immediately. Like this your thumb doesn't get blocked by the apoyando action, nor your hand compromised with the position because of a rest stroke style. Hope this description is clear enough :) Thank you for joining the premiere and I wish you a beautiful weekend!

@@MerceFont crystal clear! Thanks for the answer!

Working on damping techniques certainly will develop good thumb action independence :)

There are many damping techniques so I believe the best is to have all the different possibilities in your musical 'tool box' and use the one that fits best for every situation :)

Hola Juan! Gracias por el comentario, te contesto en ingles asi todos lo pueden leer si les interesa :) You can use the rest stroke if the musical situation allows it (eg, within a ritardando, when there are no arpeggios on top, or when the voicing is clear enough that you have ample space and time to do such action without breaking your phrasing). In other situations where the music is either faster, or the note is a resolution and you don't want to accidentally play an accent (we know thumb is always a rather heavy-sounding finger), or any other situation, you might be better off going back for a second to touch the string that you want to damp. On the other hand, you can also make a technique that is a 'hybrid' within rest and free stroke. You just plug the 5th in free stroke but measure the movement so that the landing is directed to the 4th to stop it immediately without having to make a rest stroke hand adjustment. So similar to what you wrote ' simply do the tirando movement with the pulgar on the 5th string and then just rotate it back to the 4th in order to damp this "higher" string' but without the part of 'rotating the finger back'. The difference is very subtle, but it can also be of help in tricky situations when the extra movement is too much and the rest stroke isn't helping your musical direction).

@@MerceFont Thank you so much for the detailed response, Merce. Now I'm heading back to the practice room and get x1000 times better at dampening strings.

Awesome!!!! practice well!! 🙌🏻

Dear Ramy, yes, sometimes the thumb will have to jump more than one or two strings to damp one string. Depending on the musical situation that can easily be done with the right hand and some others, where the music happens really fast (see part 2 of the tutorial, it will clarify some things on that) is preferable to use the left hand instead. Hope I could clarify your doubt! Keep practicing and I wish you a great holiday time!

​@@MerceFont You are a great teacher and a great humble person. Thanks for replying to every comment of every audience and thanks for the great videos. We will always wait for your videos. Greetings from sunny Egypt. Have a nice holiday too

Hola Jose, ya me gustaría poder hacer contenido en los dos idiomas pero no tengo tiempo material para hacerlo todo doble. Quizás algún día hago algún que otro en español, pero en general lo hago todo en inglés ya que gente de una gran variedad países lo puede más o menos entender, aun que no sea su lengua materna :) Un saludo y feliz Navidad!

thanks for the feedback! its always useful to know what you guys prefer to keep improving the videos! :)

hahahah thanks for writing that because I always keep mixing them up... LOL

Yea phase seems to be out of order but it kinda sounds cool lol