Narciso Yepes s Revolutionary Technical Developments This is a story that has been recounted numerous times by Yepes and by his students You know the guitar is a very unusual instrument for it seems that in every city of the world there is a great genius of the guitar someone who knows every single thing there is to know about the guitar someone who s genius is so great that he or she can learn nothing from anyone else However I have never felt that way about myself When I was around 15 I could play virtually everything written for the guitar but I knew I needed a teacher so I went to see a composer and music teacher by the name of Vicente Ascencio a very famous man in Spain The first thing he asked me to play was a musical scale I played a standard guitar scale using alternating i and m fingers and I played it about as well as any guitarist I had ever heard Ascencio told me that my scale was not acceptable He played a scale on the piano which was much faster than any guitarist could play a scale Then he picked up a violin and played a scale much faster than I could play He showed me a musical scale on several other orchestral instruments and told me that this is how he expected me to play a scale if I was to be a musician I tried again to match his accepted norm for scales but I could not do so I then told him that this could not be done on the guitar and in fact no one at the time could play guitar scales at the tempos Ascensio and others were using on standard classical instruments He told me Too bad but if you want to study music with me you must give up the guitar I expect you to be able to execute scales at the tempos that have long been the norm Well I had two choices One was to be the genuis of the guitar to get mad and storm out the door The other choice was to swallow my pride and to accept Ascencio as my teacher where I would be obligated to perform at the level of his other students Fortunately I chose to stay and learn for the door was open for Ascencio to be my teacher and I chose to swallow my pride and study with him and THIS DECISION HAS MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE I went home thought about scales and realized that no pianist could play such rapid scales when using only two fingers on the right hand I started using three fingers instead ami mia iam and the next week I was able to play a musical scale He smiled and told me that I did not have to give up the guitar after all Then he asked me for a chromatic scale in 3rds and again the technique used for classical guitar at that time could not execute what other instrumentalists were doing By the next week I had figured out a way to play 3rds at the accepted tempo Thus we went week after week and I continued to solve the difficulties to his satisfaction Eventually I had developed a revolutionary technique for the guitar As a result of the experience I have come to understand one thing The minute a guitarist decides he or she is a genius and pridefully refuses to enter when the door is open to a qualified teacher is the minute when that guitarist has brought his or her art to a dead end You may also wish to look up Yepes s three fingered scales trills techniques Most guitarists are clueless as to the mechanical technical theory of this they think it is just repeating a m i over and over again But it goes with a mechanical theory that is ingenius and as all great ideas so simple and logical it is amazing that no guitarist in the hundreds of years before Yepes ever realized this theory And that is just one of the many new techniques Yepes invented You may add your citation needed comments to call this into question but it will not take away the facts of Yepes s achievements