This post will be a little different. I‘d like to tell you more about myself because I recently discovered something.
When I was a teenager I fell in love with the Bach Violin Concerto in E Major. I think it was an Anne Sophie Mutter record that I used to play. I didn’t understand why I loved that key so much. I also fell deeply for the whole Solo Partita by Bach for Solo Violin in E Major. There really wasn’t much else that I had in my repertoire in this key but for me it was as though the sun came out and shined golden on my life with E Major.
Since then I have always loved this key and key signatures never have bothered me a bit since properly learning all the scales and arpeggios. I don’t even get it when people complain about the number of “enemies” on a piece, meaning a key with a lot of sharps or flats. (Okay, I do get it actually, because this means that the complainers simply have not acquainted themselves fully enough with their instruments and all of the keys that we play in.)
Now that I have been using guitar a lot more in my teaching and accompanying it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks, that this is THE Guitar Key, HELLO!
Classical guitars are often tuned E-A-D-G-B-E so it naturally follows that the strongest chord you can get from this tuning is E Major, with the two open strings ringing out and another E in between on the D string.
In German there is the word “Schicksal” which means “fate.” It’s like my fate is to make guitar and bowed stringed instruments live forever happily together ever after. So today, to help my students and anyone who is learning guitar, I published a set of one-finger major scales for guitar starting on each open string. This may exist elsewhere but in the time it would take me to find it I decided to make it myself. Just let me know if you would like a copy.
Just thought I would put that out there for you!
