ChatGPT to recommend repertoire
I decided to have a "conversation" with ChatGPT to help me pick out repertoire.
>Me: I can play Andrew York’s home reasonably well and it’s about at the right range of my abilities. What other pieces fit my abilities?
and it gave me some recs
>I will also enjoying tomorrow’s song as played by Euros Barek
Yes I said "will" instead of "am" and voice to text botched his name.
That helps narrow your taste quite a bit. I think you mean Uroš Barič’s guitar arrangement of Ólafur Arnalds’ “Tomorrow’s Song.” There is a published Barič arrangement in A minor, and it sits squarely in that lyrical, spacious, contemporary fingerstyle/classical-guitar world.
>That sounds good. Some other pieces I love are Agua y Vinho by Gismonti (can muddle through the solo and play the duet regularly) farewell to Stromness (haven’t tried solo but do play the duet). Andrew Yorks Sweet Life (too hard). The water is wide arranged by ed gerhart (pretty easy for me) Birds Flew Over the Spire is daily repertoire work, evocation by Merlin
>a bit more refining. I told it Cavatina (a rec) was too hard on my lh and that I actively dislike tremolo.
and it came back with a "ladder" of 25 pieces of increasing complexity. It gave an idea on how to practice. It ended with this:
That makes the pattern much clearer. Your ideal repertoire is less about velocity and more about control of color, sustain, balance, and warmth—pieces where the real difficulty is making a simple phrase sound beautiful.
That’s why Home, Un Día de Noviembre, Snowflight, Farewell, Tomorrow’s Song, Evocación, and Água e Vinho all make sense together. They reward exactly the things you seem to enjoy working on: shaping a melody over accompaniment, keeping basses warm without overpowering the top voice, controlling decay, and finding different colors for repeated material.
I’d move these pieces especially high on your list now:
- Sérgio Assad – Farewell — definitely worth taking on as a solo. It sounds like a very natural fit.
- Máximo Diego Pujol – Verde Alma — probably still my strongest “new discovery” candidate for you.
- Roland Dyens – Lettre à la Saudade — more about atmosphere and color than speed.
- Carlo Domeniconi – Nostalgia — similarly inward and tone-driven.
- Andrew York – Lullaby — easier technically, but very rewarding if you treat it as a tone study rather than a student piece.
- Ólafur Arnalds – We Contain Multitudes, in Barič’s arrangement — again, the difficulty is making sparse material feel alive.
- Francis Kleynjans – Barcarolle No. 1 — another piece where a beautiful sound matters more than athletic technique.
I’d also slightly change the way I think about your “stretch” repertoire. For you, a good stretch piece should be hard because of voicing, phrasing, sustain, and expressive control, not because it has 16th-note runs at ♩=140 or endless left-hand contortions.
That means a slower piece can still be genuinely advanced for you without feeling frustrating. In fact, I suspect you’d get more satisfaction from spending a month making eight measures sound gorgeous than from spending the same month forcing a fast passage up to tempo.
And Assad’s Farewell is a particularly good sign: if the solo version looks manageable to you, I’d put that near the very front of your next-project list. It may be one of those pieces that sits just above your comfort zone technically but right in the center of your musical strengths.
===
It tells me it can evaluate a video of my playing, but I haven't gone that far yet.