This is a video from 1976 or so that every student of the classical guitar should beg, buy, borrow or steal (don't steal mine, though!). Then put it on DVD so it won't wear out as you watch it over and over again. People taking my folk guitar classes should also get a kick out of this video, seeing with what ease Segovia played. There are so many reasons to watch this tape. For one thing, if some sources that say Segovia was born not in 1893 but 7 years earlier are right, then just think - you've got to be doing something right technically if you can play the guitar as intricately as this for 6 hours a day until you are 100 years old, without injuring your hands! There is so much footage of Segovia playing whole pieces, with shots of his left hand, his right hand, shots from the back, that I am tempted to say that everything I know about the guitar I learned from this Segovia tape. (Of course, the shots of the Alhambra, of Granada, etc. are absolutely beautiful too!) Don't get caught up in doubts like "his hands are bigger than mine" or "he's Segovia." Instead, look at how he uses his hands and try to do the same. You can! That's what practicing technique is all about - discovering all those little finesses. Like in the left hand, his thumb is always between the first and second finger, of course on the middle of the back of the neck, and if he shifts his hand position, his thumb automatically goes with, except if he does a shift of only one fret. You can see him looking ahead before he shifts. Planning ahead is so important! His fingers are always curved and apart. His hand is parallel to the fingerboard, unless he sometimes turns it slightly toward his little finger to favor it. His fingers stay close to the frets. And his fingers are always relaxed. In fact, he himself is very relaxed because his motions are always small, relaxed and prepared. In both hands, if he can find a way to simplify a motion, he will! That's why it looks so easy, and I'm telling you, with my bony fingers, that all we have to do is the same thing.
I am starting to get the feeling that people who pull faces when they play are doing more than they should technically, they are overexerting themselves to make bigger motions than necessary, and this overexertion causes them to make faces. I really think Segovia didn't make faces because he didn't need to. In his right hand what strikes me most is how he always prepares the next stroke or hand position. He uses the time between the notes to do so. And the strokes themselves are very small and subtle - for a forte, he will just dig deeper into the string. You look for the place on your finger and the string where you make a small subtle motion but still get a big sound. And he keeps his thumb close to the fingers because it is more relaxed there than anywhere else. And sometimes he tilts his hand to get more on the left side of his fingers for a sweeter sound. Sometimes, that allows him to just rotate his arm instead of moving it, like when he goes from chords to single-note passages in the Sor Minuet. Look at the position of the fingers to the string just before he strikes. The only thing I miss in this tape is big changes in tone color. It seems that to get a warm tone color, Segovia preferred changing the left hand fingering to moving his right hand over the sound hole or even further. You can watch Guitarra! By Bream for that. This is probably getting too technical, and of course, there is no way to do justice to Segovia's expertise in a small article like this. Even a doctoral dissertation by some genius wouldn't be enough. If you were taking lessons with me, we would probably spend some time after one your regular lessons looking at this video together (at no extra charge, because I would be picking up on new details myself). I would keep pausing it to rave some more. Anyway, the operative words seem to be small, subtle, sometimes and relaxed. Listen to your teachers, look at what you are doing, and verify by watching this tape frequently. Always second-guess yourself. And as nice as it would be to have Segovia's hands, it's so much more important just to do what he did with them.