Hey!

Our YouTube Find of the Week brings us into the cozy comfort of winter, and the Album of the Week provides rays of sunshine, while Leon looks up at the freezing cold Berlin winter sky in the sheet music category. Opposites can coexist. And if you're planning to record a long album or simply your next YouTube video during the season with shorter days, or if you want to venture into guitar recording for the first time, you'll hopefully find plenty of inspiration in the interview with Johannes Frank from Feinklang Mastering.

By the way: You can now find the answers to our poster question as a poster on a small but excellent Instagram channel:

Be inspired and feel free to share them with guitar friends and colleagues who could use a little inspiration in their everyday concert, practice, and teaching lives! We, for one, always look forward to the artists' answers to this question and find it exciting to see what message our interview partners would print on a poster.

We hope you enjoy this issue!

Stefan and Willi

YOUTUBE FIND OF THE WEEK
with Karlejin Langendijk

Looks like it's wintertime now. At least in Berlin, temperatures have dropped below zero. But what could be cozier than sunshine accompanied by bitter cold? That's right: snow. Don't worry – our video of the week isn't an arrangement of “Let it Snow,” and we’ll be sure to keep our hands off “Last Christmas” too. The piece we found is called “Winter.” Get out your thick jacket, go for a walk, and when you get back home, make yourself a cup of tea and watch this wonderful video. For our readers overseas: you can also do this in regions where there is no winter (optionally without the jacket). Karlijn plays her piece so delicately and lightly that we watched it several times in a row. In short: “Winter” by Karlejin Langendijk brought us acoustic comfort and coziness and doubled the positive things about the cold season.

ALBUM OF THE WEEK
with Berta Rojas

Today's album focuses on two of the most important female guitarists of all time. Paraguayan guitarist Berta Rojas dedicates her album Legado to Ida Presti and María Luisa Anido. A truly fitting trio of extraordinary women!

Berta Rojas takes the listener by the hand and guides them through the legacy of two outstanding guitarists and composers with crystal-clear, powerful sound and highly convincing interpretations. The whole thing is complemented by tributes to the two: J.W. Duarte dedicates a piece to Ida Presti with “Idylle Pour Ida,” while Sergio Assad portrays Anido in four movements in “Anido's Portrait.”

If you want to get a first impression, we recommend “Danse Rhythmique” by Ida Presti! It sounds like a sunny, warm day in this cooler and darker season!

You can find detailed background infos about Legado in the Booklet (PDF) on Bertas Homepage: www.bertarojas.com/legado

MORNING-ROUTINE
A coffee with Leon Albert

Hi Leon, what’s the routine for this week?

Looking up at the sky.

KNOW-HOW
with Johannes Frank

Want to sharpen your sound and make your recordings clearer, warmer, and more intimate? Today we're talking about recorded music. Johannes Frank is the man behind Feinklang Mastering, a studio with excellent monitoring creds and extensive experience in pop, classical, and acoustic music. We've been working with him for quite a while and trust him with our sound. Johannes isn't a traditional sound engineer, and that's exactly what brings fresh perspectives to the mixing table. Our conversation focuses on what distinguishes a good recording from a great one, where to start with miking, and how to tell when it's right. We talk about decisions in mixing and mastering to preserve transients, dynamics, and warmth, plus a little practical tip. As always, we end with our poster question. And you: What does your ideal guitar recording sound like?

Hi Johannes, what distinguishes a good acoustic guitar recording from a great one in your opinion?
For me, the decisive difference is the closeness and intimacy that a recording conveys. A good recording reproduces the instrument correctly and in a balanced way – you hear everything you should hear. A great recording, on the other hand, lets you feel the instrument. It creates that special feeling of sitting in the room with the guitar yourself. Personally, I am a big fan of the neo-classical sound. It often has less distance and seems more immediate than classical recordings, which usually have a lot of ambient sound and thus a certain formal rigor. I am more drawn to this close, almost private sound aesthetic – where every stroke, every movement of the fingers, and every tiny nuance remains audible. This closeness is what can make a recording truly touching for me.

Miking: Where would you start with position and distance, and how can you tell when it's “right”?
I almost always start with two small-diaphragm microphones – one on the fretboard at the 7th fret and one close to the sound hole of the body, both quite directly pointed. The distance depends heavily on the playing style: for gentle, dynamic fingerpicking, it can be a little closer, but for powerful strumming or percussive playing, it's better to be a little further away to avoid overdriving the microphone capsule and creating a harsh sound. As a starting point, I've found that a distance of about two hand widths, or around 20 centimeters, works well.

You can tell when it's “right” by the fact that the guitar sounds tangible. If you close your eyes and feel like the instrument is right in front of you, then you've got it right. This feeling often comes naturally when the balance, phase, and distance are in harmony.

Mixing and mastering: What factors are crucial for you in order to preserve transients, dynamics, and warmth?
The most important thing for me is to be mindful when using compression and limiting. Some compressors almost swallow transients, while others only round them off slightly or even emphasize them. I listen very carefully to determine which character is right for the moment.

An acoustic guitar recording thrives on its dynamics. If you smooth it out too much, you quickly lose the feeling of authenticity. The subtle differences between soft and powerful strums often tell the emotional story of the piece. My goal is for the end result to sound as if you were sitting right next to the guitar – warm, natural, and full of movement.

Do you have a little, perhaps counterintuitive “secret trick” that almost always helps?
Not necessarily counterintuitive, but important: I like to play around with the exact position and rotation of the two direct microphones and their distance from each other. Even small changes can have a big effect. The phase position is particularly exciting – it can either completely cancel out the mids or make them really stand out. And it's the mids that are crucial for the character and intimacy of the recording. Here, it can also help not to balance the microphones equally, but to choose one of the two and only mix in the second one.

Another point that many people underestimate is the support microphones in the room. They don't have to be mixed loudly, but they give the recording that “I was there” character. It's as if you're not only hearing the guitar, but also the room in which it breathes. This makes the sound lively, organic, and often much more emotional.

Imagine you could have one sentence printed on a poster to be put up in huge numbers at all the (classical) music festivals in the world. What sentence would that be?
Embrace art for it is the fuel of joy.

More about Johannes and his “Feinklang”-Studio: feinklang-mastering.de/home

FEEL-GOOD TUNE OF THE WEEK
with Noga Erez

An upbeat and positive melody! It makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning. Or take a look at the sky in the middle of the day. Stress? Bad news? Put on your headphones, let your hair blow in the wind and jump on the good mood train!

Our feel-good tune of the week!

OUTRO

Thank you for reading! Please feel free to send us your suggestions and comments directly in response to this issue. As always, you can find new music discoveries – including artists we wrote about in today's issue – in our Spotify playlist for the newsletter, which we have linked below.

Be kind to one another.

Stay tuned!

Stefan & Willi

supported by

New Classical Guitar is a newsletter by Willi Leinen and Stefan Degel from TMBM. You can find our music and more information about our journey at http://t-m-b-m.com/.

On Spotify, we curate a playlist with our favorite pieces. Feel free to follow our New Classical Guitar Playlist at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3ZwxJRAsW9Zs2JiS2eLy6a?si=9b2a737f01c043a4 and recommend new additions.