How to Learn a Classical Guitar Piece

How to Learn a Piece of Music

The above live session focuses on something guitarists ask about constantly: What do you actually do before you start playing a new piece? Not the fingers-on-strings part, but what happens before that; the part most players skip entirely.

It’s easy to see why it gets skipped. A piece arrives, it’s exciting, and the instinct is to grab the guitar and start reading. Six months later, a teacher or a more experienced ear points out a wrong note that’s been there since day one, or a rhythm that was never quite right. By then the habit is baked in, and undoing a repeated habit takes far longer than learning it correctly would have the first time. In the session, Simon put it simply: the body knows whatever it repeats. If a passage gets played incorrectly a hundred times before anyone notices, that’s a hundred repetitions working against you.

Why a Process Beats Instinct

A structured approach isn’t extra homework, it’s what actually saves time.

It saves you time: Every note, rhythm, or dynamic that gets corrected later has to be unlearned before it can be relearned, twice the work of getting it right from the start.

It builds accuracy into memory: Thoughtful, structured repetition from the beginning means the habits being built are the ones you actually want, rather than ones you’ll spend the next six months fighting.

It protects your focus: It’s easy to be pulled toward one shiny new piece after another. Staying with a process, and staying with a piece, is what leads to real improvement, and improvement is what fuels the motivation to keep going.

The session touches the same ground you’d expect a process like this to cover: key and form, harmony, dynamics, phrasing, voices, ornaments, fingering. If you want that laid out as a standalone, step-by-step checklist you can keep next to your stand, we’ve already written that: see our Template for Learning Repertoire. What follows here is what it actually looks like applied to three real, quite different pieces.

Tárrega’s Lágrima: Mapping Key, Form, and Phrasing

Lágrima is in E major for its A section, then shifts to the parallel E minor for its B section, before a da capo al fine brings it back to the top. That’s the whole form in one sentence, and knowing it in advance means never being surprised by an accidental again.

More interesting is what happens once you look at how the phrases are built. Lágrima uses what’s called sentential structure: a musical idea is stated, repeated with only a dynamic change, and then answered by a longer, contrasting idea in the B section. Once you can hear that shape, it changes how the melody gets phrased from the very first repetition, rather than being decided on by feel six months in.

Lágrima’s texture also holds a trap for the ear. The bass line is repetitive and obvious, so obvious that it tends to come out as loud as the melody unless it’s deliberately pulled back in the mix. There’s a middle voice too, easy to miss entirely, that needs to sit quieter still. Getting that three-layer balance, melody most prominent, bass second, middle voice least, right from the start avoids having to relearn the piece’s whole dynamic shape later.

Fingering gets the same early attention. In one passage, a fingering most players wouldn’t default to (second finger sliding as a guide from the A down to the G-sharp, rather than lifting and jumping) keeps contact with the string the whole way and makes the shift far more reliable, with a bit of natural glissando as a bonus. Elsewhere, deliberately avoiding a repeated open-string fingering removes unwanted string noise. Neither choice is obvious from the page. Both come from understanding the music first and choosing the fingering second, rather than the other way around.

The de Visée Prelude: Finding the Voices Inside the Texture

The de Visée Prelude is where “exploding the score” gets demonstrated directly. Guitar notation compresses multiple independent lines onto one staff, which disguises just how much is actually happening. Pull the top voice out on its own, then the bass, and both are fairly easy to follow. The middle voice is the one that takes detective work: it’s genuinely obscured in the notation, and it’s exactly the kind of thing a teacher spends a lesson pointing out if a player hasn’t gone looking for it first.

Once the voices are separated, other things surface too, descending scale lines worth bringing out with a thumb, phrase groupings that turn out to be part of a sequence, harmonies that can be mapped underneath the moving lines. None of this is advanced theory. It’s closer to noticing, on purpose, what’s already there.

Giuliani’s Allegro, Op. 50: Turning Arpeggios into Chords

The Allegro is built almost entirely from arpeggios, and arpeggios can make a page look far more complicated than the music underneath actually is. Stack the notes of each arpeggio into a block chord instead, and a page of sixteenth notes reduces to a simple progression, in this case built on the same three chords (a minor i, iv, and V) that underpin an enormous amount of folk and pop music. Once that’s visible, the piece stops being a string of fast notes to get through and becomes a much smaller number of harmonic decisions to shape.

The same piece is also where the session gets into dynamics as a creative choice rather than an afterthought: a hairpin crescendo shaped to follow the contour of a rising phrase, a poco ritardando placed deliberately, a softer articulation tried out on a repeated idea just to see how it lands. These are decisions made early, as experiments, instead of being left until “later” (which usually means never).

Ornaments get worked separately from all three pieces throughout the session, isolated as their own two-bar exercises rather than drilled inside the music itself. The reasoning is straightforward: an ornament is technically demanding on its own, and trying to learn it at the same time as the musical line it’s decorating tends to get in the way of understanding either one properly.

Seeing the Process in Action

Working through three quite different pieces, Tárrega’s Lágrima, the Prelude in D minor by de Visée, and Giuliani’s Allegro, Op. 50, shows how the same process adapts to different textures. In the Giuliani, a page of arpeggios reduces neatly into simple block chords once the harmony is identified, which makes the underlying shape of the music far easier to hear and to shape (a free Giuliani Allegro Study Guide walks through this exact reduction, piece by piece). In the prelude, “exploding” the texture into its separate voices reveals a melodic line hiding in the middle of the texture, one that’s easy to miss (or to accidentally play too loudly) if the voices are never separated out. In the Tárrega, understanding the sentence-like phrase structure changes how a fairly simple melody is shaped from the very first repetition, and a free Lágrima Study Guide covers the full key, form, and voicing breakdown used here.

From the Live Q&A

A good chunk of the session went to questions from the room, and a few are worth surfacing here on their own:

On self-compassion in practice: it’s a legitimate, necessary part of the process, not a soft add-on to it, especially for adult learners willing to be beginners again in front of other people.

On why bad habits are so hard to undo: repetition lays down neural pathways, so changing a habit means working against an existing one, not just building a new one from nothing. That’s the whole case for getting things right early.

On recovering joy when a piece feels like a grind: sometimes the honest answer is that the piece is past the edge of what’s called the zone of proximal development, just past a player’s current comfort zone, not miles beyond it. A short break, an easier piece that targets the same specific technique, or time spent with a different style entirely can all do more good than pushing straight through the wall.

On staying with a piece over the long haul: getting to know a piece well is compared to getting to know a person, a first impression, then a working relationship, then real familiarity. Different recordings, arrangements for other instruments, and the history around a composer all deepen that relationship in a way that simply repeating the notes doesn’t.

Try It This Week

Pick one piece you’re already working on and spend fifteen minutes on two things: mark the key signature and the form, and pick one internal voice to isolate and play on its own. That’s the whole exercise. It’s small, but it’s the beginning of a process that saves months of undoing later.

For the full step-by-step version of that process, one you can apply to any new piece you pick up, see the Template for Learning Repertoire. And if you’d like this kind of structure built into a complete, piece-by-piece curriculum rather than something you assemble yourself, that’s what the Cornerstone Method inside the Academy is for.