Renaissance Guitar Music

This book presents 37 pieces of Renaissance guitar music transcribed for solo fingerstyle ukulele together with the author’s recordings of every transcription. Moreover, a generous introduction provides a brief history of the Renaissance guitar, tips on period ornamentation and musicianship, recommended recordings, and invaluable resources for further research of your own.

Throughout Europe, the Renaissance guitar was a popular instrument in the middle of the sixteenth century. Its composers left us a treasure-trove of music, from rustic dances to chansons and elaborate fantasias. Five-hundred years later, this music fits beautifully on the Renaissance guitar’s musical descendant, the ukulele.

The Renaissance guitar and the ukulele share an almost identical tuning. As the transcriptions in this book are written in standard notation and tablature, any type of ukulele, from soprano to baritone—as well as the top four strings of the guitar— can be used to play them.

Most of the pieces are in standard gCEA or GCEA tuning; the seven pieces in the second section of the book, however, require low-G tuning to render the counterpoint as written. It’s also possible for guitar and baritone uke players to read the tablature provided. The music will sound a perfect 4th lower than the notation, but as there was no standard pitch in the time of the Renaissance guitar, modern players should feel no obligation to play this music at fixed pitch. If you wish to read from the tablature and sound in the same key as the notation for ensemble purposes, guitar and baritone uke players merely need to place a capo at the fifth fret. With a certain sense of historical irony, the music of the Renaissance guitar is here reborn on modern fretted instruments.