Hey Everyone,
A common problem that I had in the past is that when it came time to play at a wedding or a background gig – I often didn’t have enough repertoire lying around that was both easy enough to sight-read and hard enough so that it didn’t sound like I was playing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ over and over again.
Having a good collection of classical guitar sheet music for weddings and other functions is really a must for every aspiring classical guitar performer. It’s great to play your “big numbers” but chances are in most occasions you’ll just be providing background music and some of the larger more complex works might not be very appropriate for the venue. Plus, having a nice selection of smaller pieces gives you the opportunity to work on reading and musicality with a variety of different pieces which I feel is very important.
I find a nice selection of Spanish and 19th century rep works very well for these occasions as that tends to be the type of music that people think about when they think ‘Classical Guitar’ – you can always throw in some more modern stuff too if you think you can get away with it but just keep an active eye on your audience to make sure that you’re not offending their sensibilities too much! Serialism and Weddings tend not to go together (in most circumstances anyway!).
I highly recommend learning some jazz/fingerstyle arrangements as well as this can help to break up the typical classical guitar rep and you really can’t go wrong with some Beatles arrangements!
I highly recommend the ‘Huge Book Of Classical Guitar Solos’ – This version is in TAB as well but it has all the rep you’ll ever need for wedding ceremonies, restaurant gigs, corporate functions etc… Plus there is infinite amount of sight-reading material which makes this one of the best 30 bucks I’ve ever spent.
Check Out ‘The Huge Book Of Classical Guitar Solos’ Here
Aside from this there are a bunch of other ‘Wedding Repertoire’ books for the classical guitar out there but honestly I’ve found that while each of those books might contain 10-20 selections, they each cost $20-30 and 9 times out of 10 you’ll find the exact same arrangements in this book anyways!
Good luck with all of your gigging!
Cheers,
Rob
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Funny enough I just started thinking about this a few days ago and will be adding to this list over the summer: http://www.classicalguitarcanada.ca/sheet-music/classical-guitar-gig-wedding-book/
Not much on there yet but I plan to eventually have one hour set worth (I’ll have to link to other books for popular tunes like beatles and jazz but it will likely be 50% free and 50% by purchase from me)…
Hey Bradford,
Yeah it’s a good thing to have for sure! I’ve used this book countless times over the years, especially one summer where I was playing 3 hours a night 6 days a week at a restaurant! You run out of stuff to play fast
I’m going to keep adding to this one as well
Cheers,
Rob
I’ve gotten into a habit of memorizing everything, mainly for RCM testing. This usually means if I don’t keep on my pieces, I forget bits very easily. This also is slowing me down for learning new pieces. I really have to force myself to let go and work on sight reading more. Very nice article, Thanks!!
Derek
President
Regina Classical Guitar Society
Yep I know the feeling man, it’s really important to work on those reading skills so you can bring pieces back very easily as well as digest new material quickly!