VANCOUVER CLASSICAL GUITAR FESTIVAL

The Daily Workshops comprises of various workshops that target specific skills related directly to guitar playing:

​

Musicianship is a class where we will work on note-reading, rhythm-reading and developing a sense of beat. These skills are too often omitted during private lessons due to the limitation of time. Learning how to feel the beat and internalizing rhythm, is one of the most crucial aspects of playing music and by the end of this workshop, participants should feel comfortable breaking down rhythm in their own pieces.

​

Faculty workshops give students insight on  how the basic mechanics of the body work around the guitar and what exercises are good to develop different skills. Each Faculty member will give a workshop on a topic of their choosing. 

​

Learning Effectively is a two-part workshop where we will discuss aspects of how to best learn a piece and how to appropriately translate the information on the page to your fingers to your guitar. During Assimilating the score, we will look into how to break down the piece into manageable chunks of information that your brain can understand and manipulate most effectively, creating chains that we can convey at will. From breaking down pieces into different issues, finding good fingerings, why right hand fingering matters as much as left hand one, how to create good muscle memory, and how to use the metronome will be explored in this series. In the second part, Putting it to Practice, we will take a look at how to practice and talk about how consistency in the practice room is the way to achieve more successful and rewarding performances. 

​

The Masterclasses will be opportunities to learn directly from the guest faculty in a friendly setting.  Masterclasses will be taught by our guest faculty. There are only sixteen 30-min spots for players to perform for the guest artist and participation is included in the full registration.

​

The Closing Gala Concert is a chance for participants of the festival to perform in front of an audience and put into practice what was learned over the week.

​