" 2009 (UTC)

Mel Bay may cite Marlow as ""something of an authority on the ten-string guitar"", but also as something of an authority on the ten-string guitar I have reviewed her approach guide and found it misinformative in the following respects:
 
1. In the front matter, Janet Marlow claims that ""Narciso Yepes [...] heard that there were four tones with less sustain due to missing sympathetic resonance on the six-string guitar"". In truth, Narciso Yepes always, verifiably stated that there are eight notes (from the twelve that make the chromatic octave) that do not have string resonance (i.e. a sympathetic response from an adjacent string). This can be verified in practically any of his various articles and interviews as well as in his Speech of Ingression into the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando delivered on 30 April 1989: ""The strings that I have added incorporate all the natural resonance that the instrument lacked in eight of the twelve notes of the equal tempered scale."" That is not only on six-string guitars. Also ten-string guitars that do not have the specific tuning invented by Yepes cannot lay claim to having unison sympathetic string resonances for all the twelve notes in all positions on the treble strings. This is an indisputable fact of acoustics, a science, which as such cannot be fudged.

2. Marlow does not define the term ""resonance"", which is used in this book in the lay sense rather than in its acoustic/scientific sense. This is evident from the chapter on ""Controlling Resonance"" in which controlling ""resonance"" is equated with a vibrating bass string that has been actively plucked. In fact, this is not string resonance, but simply a vibrating string. Resonance is the tendency of a system (like a string) to vibrate sympathetically at a particular natural frequency in response to energy induced at that frequency (that is, on another string). 

3. No adequate explanation of how this resonance actually functions is offered anywhere in this book. In fact, the singular tuning that adds all eight missing resonances is relegated to an aside comment in parenthesis. In addition, it is claimed that the author's ""own"" method of tuning ""satisfies the needed sustain"" (Preface). As a fact of acoustics, the author's tuning system does not provide sympathetic string resonance for all the notes of a chromatic scale, nor does it thus equalize the sustain, resonance, timbre, or volume among the twelve notes of the octave (which is the entire primary purpose behind the invention of the modern 10-string guitar). The tuning system used in this method, for example, supplies no resonance for the notes of F-natural and B-flat, neither does it offer any resonance for C's. 

4. In the Preface, Marlow claims that ""In my own process over twenty five years I have developed the tuning"" that forms the basis for this method. In fact, this method of tuning had already been fully developed by 1982, not ""over twenty five years"". Records of this are in the March 1982 edition of Guitar Player magazine, in an interview with Marlow by Allan Kozinn. Furthermore, this concept is therein attributed to Oscar Castro-Neves (March 1982: 20), not to Janet Marlow's ""own process"". 

5. The transcriptions of baroque music (by Bach and Weiss) offered in this book are fraught with stylistic problems too numerous to list but for a few. For example, the ornaments (which are an integral part of baroque music) have been inexplicably omitted (eg. trills in bars 8 and 15 of the Weiss Courante). Furthermore, stylistically inappropriate melodic intervals have been introduced in the bass line. For example, in bars 1-3 of the Courante, instead of the smooth bass line moving by steps from A2 to G#2 [minor 2nd] to F#2 [major 2nd]) - as intended by Weiss in good baroque style - we find erratic leaps of an augmented octave [A2 to G#1] and a minor 7th [G#1 to F#2]. Where this descending line should be structurally mirrored in bars 36-38, we find again an erratic undermining of the formal and stylistic elements of the composition, simply to keep the bass notes on open strings. As such it seems rather insincere that the author lists ""the correct use of octaves and bass lines intended by the composer"" as a justification for using the 10-string guitar when this is clearly not the case in her own use of the instrument. Also, very little consideration seems to be shown for open basses ringing together where they should not, for example, the first three bass notes of the Courante all continue to ring together forming two dissonances (augmented octave and minor 7th) where the composer intends a clean line in the bass. That is, the bass line should be a melody, not a cacophany of dissonant harmonic intervals. (I refer also the the DVD version of this book, now discontinued, on which Marlow performs her transcription.) 
NEW