New to this piece? See the complete Lágrima study guide for an overview of the main technical and musical challenges.
Lágrima appears simple, but playing it expressively is more difficult than many guitarists expect. Many players can play the notes, but struggle to convey true musicality. Balance is a key aspect of this piece's advanced musicality. Fortunately, balance in Lágrima can be trained deliberately. With the right exercises, you can see progress in minutes each day. In this lesson, I’ll show you how to develop balance in four main measures and four key beats with focused exercises.
Most classical guitarists are familiar with rest stroke and its benefits. Its fuller tone and greater volume are an important part of classical guitar technique. In the exercises below, we’ll use that added volume to create balance that allows the melody to sing clearly above the accompaniment. You don’t need an advanced rest stroke for this work, but you should be comfortable with the basic motion.
Balance in music is the act of making the most interesting part of the music the loudest. The most interesting part of the music is almost always the melody. The easiest way to figure out what the melody is is to find the part of the music that is most interesting to sing. This is usually the highest notes (the soprano voice), sometimes the lowest notes (the bass voice), and rarely the notes in between (the inner voices, tenor and alto).
When we talk about balance in English, we usually mean one of two things. The first is equal weight, like a perfectly balanced scale. But if you made soup by adding exactly the same weight of every spice and seasoning, the result would be terrible.
The second meaning is having things in the right proportion to one another. That is what makes a great meal: not equal amounts of every ingredient, but the right amount of each one.
Music works the same way. Good balance does not mean every note is equally loud. It means each note speaks in the right proportion, so the melody, accompaniment, and inner voices all relate to one another beautifully.
Most students only practice their scales with rest stroke. Some will practice their arpeggios with the highest notes as a rest stroke (a in arpeggios using pima, m in arpeggios using pim). But almost no one practices rest stroke fingers with simultaneous free stroke thumb.
This is a glaring oversight that can lead to balance issues. After all, if you can play rest stroke scales but can’t play p together with a rest stroke, you’ll either get some weird sounds or be forced into playing free stroke when it’s less than ideal.
Take m. 14 of Lágrima as an example. It is a scale passage that should be played with a rest stroke. However, it starts with p along with melody notes. If you can’t play that first note with a loud rest stroke, either you’ll play that downbeat note softer than the rest of the scale (terrible for a downbeat) or play the scale free stroke (won’t sound as good as it could).
To develop the ability to play p with rest stroke fingers, start by alternating a free stroke thumb and a rest stroke finger at a slow, steady pace. Gradually shorten the gap between the thumb and finger notes as you gain fluency, aiming to play them almost together and, eventually, simultaneously.
Once you're comfortable playing this, you may notice that this movement feels similar to a pinching motion. For this reason, I call this movement Pinch Stroke. It, along with Pinch and Tickle stroke, are key to balance in Lágrima, Sor's Etude in B Minor, Carcassi's Andante, and many other staples of the beginner and intermediate classical guitar repertoire.
If this is difficult, play the 6th string with the thumb to position your hand well for a rest stroke finger. Using the index instead of the middle finger can also help, since its shorter length requires more reach, creating a better angle for rest stroke.
This exercise allows you to play the melody notes in mm. 2, 4, 10, and 14 with the large, full sound of the rest stroke. Use it and your balance in those measures will immediately improve.
Below, you can download my Performance and TAB scores and use it to follow along with my Technical Guide for Lágrima.
