Does it fit well on the instrument?

So I play guitar and guitar is an instrument that’s incredibly hard to write for if you aren’t familiar with how the guitar works. Piano is similar, but in a lot of ways it’s easier to write something that’ll fit easily on piano, probably because studying piano music is much more common than studying guitar music. I also think much more music will “fit” on piano. There’s a large selection of things that’ll be playable. Guitar has some limitations that piano doesn’t.

For example, guitar has only 6 strings, which means only 6 total notes can be played at a time. Those strings are also fretted with one hand, which means in order to play all of those 6 notes, they need to able to be reached by one hand. These are limitations that piano doesn’t have. Guitar can also do a lot of things that piano can’t. On guitar you can bend notes and slide between them and scrape your pick against the strings and play hammer-ons and pull-offs.

But regardless whenever writing for an instrument something I try to imagine, especially if I know the basics of that instrument, is how will it fit on that instrument. Will it fit well? Will it be playable?

What I’m thinking about is literally how will the performer’s hands have to move in order to play the piece that I’m about to give them.

Guitar is a strange instrument because, unlike violin, the strings aren’t tuned in all the same intervals. The strings ascend in fourths except for one which is a major 3rd. That makes it a little difficult to write for unless you know the specific shapes that work.

Violin is similar, but violinists don’t often play chords.

Guitar you play chords all the time.

So don’t write out specific chord voicings for guitar. Writing out specific chord voicings for guitar likely won’t fit well on guitar if you don’t know the shapes that will fit.

There are a few standard shapes like for C, D, G, E, and A that can be used, but when writing for any instrument it can be useful to learn enough about that instrument to imagine what it’ll be like to play.

For example if you’re writing something for flute and there’s a run that has a tricky fingering change where many different fingers are moving in different directions, that might make it difficult to play that specific thing quickly. Learning just enough to be able to imagine what it’d be like to play is often enough. You don’t need to be able to actually play it, though that’d help quite a bit too.

Just knowing how the different strings, valves, finger holes and keys work and change the notes is a great start.

And it can save you a headache of having to rewrite something while in the studio and waste valuable, and expensive, studio time. It can also be a little embarrassing to have to change your music in the middle of a recording session.

ISJ