Explore nylon-string technique with these tips from a veteran Nashville-based guitarist and Music & Arts instructor.
The Nashville-based guitarist and educator William “Tiger” Fitzhugh, who teaches at the Music & Arts in Hendersonville, Tenn., is a fount of guitar knowledge spanning styles, techniques and eras. He’s also a delightfully funny, self-deprecating storyteller.
To wit: Decades ago, Fitzhugh was playing his nylon-string guitar on a gig in the lobby of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, then home base for the Nashville Symphony. The influential classical guitarist Christopher Parkening was the symphony’s guest soloist that evening, which meant, in Music City, that a sizable chunk of the concertgoers consisted of remarkably gifted pickers.
Typically, Fitzhugh would play what he calls “classical rhythm guitar” as background music for ticket holders making their way toward the main auditorium. But on this particular evening he noticed he had a more attentive audience. Those illustrious guitarists, Fitzhugh recalls, “were all standing around me, just staring. And I looked up and Chet Atkins was about two feet in front of me, just looking at me.
“I looked at him,” Fitzhugh continues, “and said, ‘As if I wasn’t nervous enough,’ and started playing. And he went away. Later, I called him and said, ‘Hey, that probably wasn’t a good career move for me.’”
Therein lies that self-deprecating sense of humor, which, Fitzhugh says with a chuckle, “has probably cost me several gigs.” The truth is that Tiger Fitzhugh has led a rich and diverse life in music, full of experiences that would no doubt pique the interest of those players who checked him out in the symphony lobby.
The diversity of his c.v. is remarkable. He’s performed Mahler onstage with the Nashville Symphony, gigged with country greats including Razzy Bailey and a young-and-hungry Alan Jackson, and recorded with “Hillbilly Jazz” master Vassar Clements, to name a few bullet points. As an educator over the last four decades, giving private lessons to beginners through graduate students, he’s tackled seemingly every American style, from blues and rock to country and jazz. He claims he’s less comfortable in bluegrass situations, but he also mentions his upcoming weekend gig with a bluegrass band.
Fitzhugh also loves working with regional big bands, which he says is “great for my reading.” Once, he recalls, when he took his guitar to a favorite repair technician for some fretwork, the tech said, “I can always tell when it’s Tiger’s guitar because all the frets are worn out evenly. He’s playing in D-flat and B-flat and A-flat and all those weird horn keys.”
But Fitzhugh’s not-so-secret weapon is his classical training and nylon-string playing. His Hal Leonard book, Classical Guitar for the Steel-String Guitarist, aims to help players much like Fitzhugh himself—experienced guitarists who learned other styles before falling in love with the nylon-string instrument. Cue the hilarious, witty surplus of modesty: “I joke that I am able to not get gigs in a much wider field than I used to before,” he says with a laugh.
Fitzhugh’s versatility has been hard-earned; rather than playing at a range of genres, he’s immersed himself in the music he wants to master. He was raised in Massachusetts and attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music for three years, but felt the pull of the musician’s life and moved to South Carolina to play around town and teach guitar at a music store. “I spent what I refer to as my 17-year summer vacation after my three years at Berklee. And the three years at Berklee were unbelievably important to me,” he says.
After relocating to Nashville in the early ’80s, he started teaching at the university level based on experience alone. Soon enough, however, the institutions where he taught demanded a degree, and Fitzhugh went back to school. “It was the first time in my life that there was a practical reason to have a degree,” he says. He’d already been exploring classical guitar, so he set to work on a bachelor’s in music performance, studying under the renowned English-born guitarist Stanley Yates at Austin Peay State University, in Clarksville, Tenn. Fitzhugh later earned a master’s as well.
Today, he continues to teach at area colleges and universities in addition to maintaining his studio at Music & Arts. While he’s able to accommodate any student’s tastes and skill set, he often finds himself filling in the gaps in musical understanding that can occur when a student has been devoted to learning songs solely by tablature. “I’ve had students come in who have been taking lessons for years but don’t know the name of a note on the neck, and can’t read a note,” he says. “But they can play that solo from [Lynyrd Skynyrd’s] ‘Tuesday’s Gone’ or ‘Gimme Three Steps’ perfectly. … I really try to get people to know what they’re doing.”
Recently, we chatted with Fitzhugh to learn more about his teaching ideas and strategies. The conversation focused on imparting classical technique to guitarists already familiar with other styles like jazz, rock, country or folk.
Air Guitar, Then Real Guitar
To get electric or steel-string-acoustic guitarists comfortable with the more vertically oriented playing position of classical guitar, Fitzhugh first asks them to stand up and “play air guitar.” More often than not, he notices, they’ll situate their hands much like a classical guitarist, with the headstock of their invisible instrument pointed upward at a 45-degree angle. Then, he simply asks them to sit down without moving their hands, and places the guitar on their knee—the knee opposite the one they’d use to play electric or steel-string guitar when seated. “What we gotta do is figure out how to get the neck up to where their hand is,” Fitzhugh says, “not bring their hand down to where the neck is.”
Eventually, students will be able to alternate between playing positions depending on the musical situation, much like Fitzhugh. “It’s kind of a psychological thing,” he says. “Now, if I have a guitar on my right leg, everything just triggers differently. And then if it’s on my left leg, everything just kind of triggers that way.”
He’ll carry an extra footstool to get his students used to elevating their leg, or advise them to assemble a stack of books measuring between 5 and 9 inches tall. Fitzhugh will also show students his picking hand’s fingernails, which extend a couple millimeters beyond the fingertip and appear rounded, tapered and smooth, with the slightest rise from left to right. “The basic stuff … you don’t want a sharp edge that the string’s going to catch and fly off of,” he says. If work or sports prevent the student from growing nails, that’s fine too, as a player can still achieve a strong, even timbre using their fingertips, which will develop calluses.
Fitzhugh also points out how difficult changing nylon strings is compared to electric or steel; the trade-off is that a set of nylon strings should last six months.
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
The guitar is a folk instrument, Fitzhugh points out, where so much can be self-taught and open to interpretation. But in classical guitar, there are correct ways for the left and right hands to make contact with the instrument. When guiding left-hand positioning, Fitzhugh finds himself repeating the phrase “Drop your wrist.” So many players coming from blues, country and rock want to hang their thumb over the neck of a classical guitar, but that simply won’t do: The thumb needs to be behind the center of the neck, so that the remaining four fingers can be as agile as possible.
The picking hand needs to be properly elevated above the bridge, not resting on it as you’d commonly find in electric playing. “With classical guitar,” Fitzhugh says, “you want to get your wrist farther away from the guitar than your knuckles.” In order to get his students used to the right-hand plucking motion that alternates between the thumb and fingers, Fitzhugh will ask them to make a fist and then practice clapping with only that hand. “I tell them to slap the palm of their hand” with their picking fingers, he says. “The sound of one hand clapping: It’s like a Zen koan, but it’s also classical guitar technique.”
The player should pluck the strings inward, toward the palm of their hand, as opposed to pulling the strings outward and away from the guitar. Once that movement becomes familiar, the student will start to understand how they can achieve a nice, strong pluck on a nylon-string and control their dynamics using only their right hand—as opposed to just cranking an amp.
Fitzhugh begins with a few basic nylon-string right-hand techniques: thumb and fingers all at once, as if playing a block chord; an alternating thumbed bass note and plucked chord; a simple arpeggio that begins with a bass note and cascades upward through the rest of the fingers; and a compound arpeggio that cycles evenly—low to high, high to low—throughout the chord, hitting notes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … and so on. The key here, Fitzhugh explains, is to use the same batch of accessible etudes, patterns and songs, so that the student can quickly focus on what the right hand is doing and tune out the left hand.
Beginner-Friendly Repertoire Before Bach
One of the greatest dangers Fitzhugh notices in getting students hooked on classical guitar is … classical guitar music. He recalls one colleague who teaches his first-year classical guitar students Bach. The problem, Fitzhugh explains, “is that there’s no Bach that’s easy to play. And even the fairly easy pieces have this little section that’s really hard.”
“Getting somebody to play something that’s beyond their technical ability at the time is bad,” he says, “because all the technique goes out the window, and they’re just desperately trying to figure out where to place their hands in order to play specific notes.”
Fitzhugh will teach easier excerpts from larger and more involved pieces, or contemporary pieces based on simple arpeggios, like the guitarist Andrew York’s “Snowflight” or works by Gerald Garcia and Cuban maestro Leo Brouwer. The etudes that Fitzhugh chose for his book include music by Ferdinando Carulli, Matteo Carcassi and Mauro Giuliani. Fitzhugh wants to challenge his students, he says, without making demands that will discourage them before they’ve mastered basic techniques.
In the way of practice routines, Fitzhugh recommends at least an hour a day for real progress—and reiterates the difference between practicing and playing. “We practice what we don’t know and we play what we know,” he says. “So practicing by definition is frustrating, because you don’t know it. But that’s what practice is.”
Everything Is a Chord, Right?
Guitarists coming from jazz to classical often have a leg up, since both disciplines require plenty of technical and theoretical knowledge. In fact, jazz players, with their keen sense of chordal harmony, tend to jibe especially well with Fitzhugh’s instruction, which references chords more frequently compared with many other classical methods. “A lot of classical players,” he says, “people who’ve been doing nothing but playing classical guitar, they’ll be playing something and I’ll say, ‘Go back to that E-minor chord.’ And they’ll go, ‘Huh?’”
As Fitzhugh points out, “Everything is a chord, right?” So simply thinking about classical compositions as the kind of chord-melody exercises you’d encounter in jazz guitar can be helpful.
Players moving from classical to other styles, Fitzhugh explains, often end up attempting to notate concepts that any self-taught guitarist would absorb as if by intuition. He tells a story about a classical mentor who wanted to rock out, so he bought a Stratocaster and transcribed the “Smoke on the Water” solo in painstaking standard notation. “I told him, ‘That’s not how you do it, man,’” says Fitzhugh. For dedicated classical musicians, Fitzhugh says, “it exists on paper before it exists in the ear.”
In the end, classical guitar, like jazz or even contemporary fingerstyle, is an opportunity for musicians to perform songs with an orchestral sense of fullness. “The reason why I suggest people [try to study classical] is that you can sound complete by yourself,” he says. “If you’re playing [Eric Clapton’s] solo to ‘Crossroads’ in your bedroom, OK, you’re playing the solo to ‘Crossroads.’ But Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker aren’t there. … If you’re playing the fingerstyle thing, it’s all there.”