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In the course of learning new music we often think that everything we need to know is in front of our eyes, but that is not always the case. Music notation system provides a lot of information about what composers intended with their music but it has its own limitations.
In this video, I discuss briefly about looking beyond what it's written in scores and how that applies to guitar music notation.
If we use an invention by Bach as an example, defining the musical voices couldn't be easier. The right hand plays one voice and the left hand the other. When we play the same piece of music on the guitar this doesn't apply, which might lead us to overlook the voicing of a piece.
Guitar music is mostly written in one staff. All voices must be packed within those 5 lines and that creates challenges not only to composers and copyists but also to musicians. As you can see in the video, some of the melodies are contained in the accompaniment line (and here I say "hidden", as we can't see right through them immediately).
One good way to avoid overlooking these "hidden" melodies is to rewrite the music using separate staves for each voice. After this, we can decide which of the voices are more important/relevant at a certain moment.
