Guitar virtuoso Alex de Grassi lends some expert advice to students honing their craft.

By Lesley Mahoney
Berklee.edu Correspondent
October 31, 2007

	Alex de Grassi performs during a master class/clinic.
	Photo by Phil Farnsworth

When finger-style steel-string guitarist and Grammy nominee Alex de Grassi presided over a master class/clinic in the Berk Recital Hall, audience members sat on the edges of their seats as he doled out advice to the budding musicians on stage.

Clearly eager with anticipation and humbled by the guitar star in their midst, several students took to the stage and shared a piece of themselves: their music.

In addition to critiquing students' acoustic guitar playing, de Grassi wowed the crowd with his own brand of genius, characterized by innovative, highly orchestrated pieces.

With each student who volunteered for a critique, de Grassi found a way to communicate universal lessons in acoustic guitar playing. He helped teach students how to make their pieces more dynamic and how to strive for "economy of motion" with their fingers. While the master class had the intimacy of a private lesson, de Grassi's advice was far-reaching enough to speak to everyone in the audience.

Rick Peckham, assistant chair of the Guitar Department, spoke about the unique master class atmosphere. "In private lessons, you don't see what's going on. Here, you can look on," he said. "The idea is that everybody gets something out of it even though only one person is playing."

For example, de Grassi offered specific, yet universally relevant advice to one student, whose composition featured what de Grassi referred to as a "call-and-answer scheme": "One thing I think you could add to make the performance a little more dynamic is to experiment a little more with your right-hand position, to differentiate between the passages, the voices. I think the more you can contrast the two voices, the more interesting it will be."

De Grassi acknowledged, meanwhile, "new techniques are best learned when you work on new material," because "you learn how to play something a certain way, so you're already wired that way."

Shohei Tyoda, an eighth-semester performance major who played "Happiness Island" by Japanese acoustic guitar player Kotaro Oshio, was grateful for the feedback. "[De Grassi] opened up my mind and gave me interesting ideas," he said. "It's a different perspective from a professional."

De Grassi, whose Berklee clinic and master class was funded by C.F. Martin & Company, has made a name for himself with his unique style of orchestrated playing. Though played solo, de Grassi's music is multi-dimensional, weaving together melody, rhythm, bass, and percussion features.

Indeed, de Grassi explained how to get a full sound while playing solo guitar. "I think when you're playing solo, you really are kind of the band or the whole group, so you not only have to think about playing a melody, for example, or a bass line, but you have to keep the rhythm," he said. "And you also have to think in terms of orchestrating."

De Grassi also encouraged students to think about a "hierarchy of accents." "It sounds like a big term but I just try to think about how I play some notes really hard and I play some notes soft, so it's a whole scheme of accenting notes."

He played "Cumulous Rising," which he said is a good example of "using different techniques, different textures, different colors of the guitar to really orchestrate a piece."

"There's a clear melody in this piece, but the melody is passing through a series of different timbres or sounds that are going on," he said.

De Grassi talked about his process for developing music. "Over the years, my method of writing and arranging music is to sit down and improvise, pull in some ideas," he said. "Usually, I develop the piece on a rhythmic motif, or what I would call a rhythmic feeling. Sometimes, they're recognizable rhythms. Other times, I can't really put my finger on it and say, that is a blank rhythm. For me, it's very much working with an image or an impression or a texture, or like in the case of this piece ["Cumulous Rising"], it's part of a collection I wrote, The Water Garden, [centered around] the theme of water." It is that album for which de Grassi was nominated for a Grammy Award and an Indie Award.

Largely self-taught, de Grassi did study music some, but got a degree in geography from "the other Berkeley," he said, referring to the University of California, Berkeley.

De Grassi's first recording, Turning: Turning Back, was released in 1978, at the genesis of Windham Hill Records. Though he initially had aspirations to be a singer, he found that he had the most talent for finger-style guitar. "After a few years, I started realizing all my deficiencies as a musician. I started going back and studying a little classical, jazz piano, and I took some private composition. For me, it's always been this process of continuing to learn, to have a better understanding of what I do and what I can do."

At the clinic/master class, de Grassi mostly played on his Lowden acoustic guitar, made in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He also brought along a unique asymmetrically shaped guitar featuring sympathetic strings—a Carlson sympitar—on which he played an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix's "Angel."

Peckham said the master class/clinic was valuable for its "master/apprentice" component. It also helps toward the department's effort to broaden the range of guitar styles, including acoustic, "to give more colors of the instrument to students here and appeal to a broader diversity of students to come here," he said.

Alex de Grassi works with student Ellen Angelico during a master class/clinic. Photo by Phil Farnsworth

Lesley Mahoney is a writer/editor in Berklee's Office of Communications.