Your Classical Guitar Input Here

One great tune

by Paul Raines
(Nampa, Idaho)

I was eighteen years old when I bought a tape of classical guitar from a bargain bin at the record store. I had always liked the guitar and learned House of the Rising Sun when I was fifteen... and then stopped playing.

Listening to a tape, I heard Joaquin Turina's Rafaga as played by Konrad Ragossonig. It was nothing but speed and fury and I was dazzled. I had to start learning immediately!

At the age of 19, I picked up my step-dad's Ventura steel string and Mel Bay #1 and worked my way through it. John Denver chord diagrams came next. I didn't want to learn three chords and start a band, as so many kids my age were doing exactly that, so a distorted electric guitar was never a consideration.

That wasn't what guitar was to me. I practiced every day for an entire year and then joined the USMC and couldn't practice again until I got to my duty station in Okinawa. I bought an Ibanez GA-150 classical guitar and started taking lessons at the Ryukyu Academy of classical music, but didn't stick with them.

Unfortunately, I had already learned enough to know that I didn't want to start over properly, which is exactly what Professor Alba insisted on. I went back to learning on my own, mostly Rush and Led Zepplin.

After I got out of the Corps, I posted a request on a classical guitar bulletin board in the early early days of the internet, and a guitar professor from Exeter, England sent me jpegs of the sheet music for Rafaga. I created a notation-to-tab conversion chart and converted it to tab and started learning it.

The wrong way, naturally.

I already had Jerry Snyder's tab book and had learned Lagrima and others from it, to varying degrees of success. Then I found Trevor Maurice and have been doing it right since then.

Seeing as how I am also a professional graphic designer, I typeset my original hand-drawn guitar map, which is attached. Everybody please feel free to use it.