What is in this collection
112 sheets of classical guitar literature, all in standard notation rather than tablature. Felix Horetzky contributes the largest share with thirty short pieces, followed by Fernando Sor with twenty-three, Mauro Giuliani with eighteen and Matteo Carcassi with thirteen; Dionisio Aguado and Johann Kaspar Mertz have eight each, Ferdinando Carulli six, and there are three pieces by Francisco Tárrega, among them “Adelita” and “Lágrima”.
This is not a random cross-section but very nearly the canon of the first three years on the instrument. Sor, Giuliani, Carcassi, Aguado and Carulli are the five names that appear in practically every classical guitar method — they were the leading guitarists of early nineteenth-century Paris, Vienna and London, and they wrote their own teaching material.
Most pieces fit on one page and last under two minutes. That is deliberate: a piece you can finish in a week gets finished; a six-page piece gets abandoned in week three.
Why notation rather than tablature
Tablature tells you where to press, but not which pitch results or how long it lasts. For copying a riff quickly that is efficient. The moment two voices run at once — and they do in almost every piece in this collection — tablature breaks down: it cannot show that the bass note is held across four beats while the upper voice keeps moving in quavers.
That holding is the central problem of classical guitar. A Sor piece in A minor typically consists of a melody in the treble, a sustained bass on the fifth and sixth strings, and an inner voice connecting the two. Notation shows with upward and downward stems which note belongs to which voice. Once you have read that, you play differently: the bass no longer gets damped the instant the finger is needed for the next melody note.
The guitar sounds an octave lower than written, which is what the small 8 under the treble clef means. The open low E sounds at 82.4 Hz, but it is written on the first ledger line below the staff, where a piano’s E would be 164.8 Hz. This convention confuses everyone arriving from another instrument, and it is why guitar and piano cannot simply read from the same part.
An order that works
Start with Horetzky. His pieces are numbered, short, and stay in first position for long stretches. Take No. 15, No. 21 and No. 38 as an entry point — about three pages together, manageable in two weeks. Then Carulli and Carcassi: same position, but first broken chords across three strings.
The third step is Sor’s studies. Real polyphony appears here for the first time, and this is where it is decided whether someone plays classical guitar or strums chords. Method: spend a week playing only the bass line of the piece, without the melody, at 60 bpm. Then a week on the melody alone. Only then both. This separation feels slow and saves weeks at the end.
Giuliani and Aguado belong in the second year, Mertz and Tárrega in the third. “Adelita” looks harmless on paper — twenty-four bars, moderate tempo — but it requires a barre at the second fret held across whole bars and a rubato you cannot read off the page. It is a good goal for the end of year two and a poor first piece.
Common mistakes
The most frequent one is releasing the bass too early. If the bass has a dotted minim while six quavers run above it, the fretting finger has to stay down for three beats. Most beginners lift it after half a beat because the hand wants to follow the melody. You can check this without a teacher: play the passage and listen for whether the bass is still sounding when the last quaver arrives.
The second is ignoring the fingering. Numbers 1 to 4 are the fretting hand, p, i, m, a the picking hand, and circled numbers the string. Improvise your own fingering in Sor and you will regularly end up in a position from which the next bar cannot be reached — the printed fingering is usually not the most comfortable one for the current bar, but the only one that keeps the bar after next playable.
The third is tempo, too early. A Carcassi piece meant to end up at 96 is practised cleanly at 60 and already sloppily at 76, because 76 feels “nearly right”. The reliable method is the tempo ladder — 60, 66, 72, 80, 88, 96 — with the rule of dropping two steps at every mistake. Anyone who sticks to it plays cleanly sooner than someone stumbling through at full speed from day one.