Daniel Monaghan Records Five Videos For The GSI YouTube Channel.

Classical guitarist and music educator, Daniel Monaghan, recently visited GSI for his first video shoot in our showroom. Daniel lives locally in Southern California. He received his Bachelor's degree from California State University, Fullerton where he studied with Andrew York and Martha Masters. He also holds a Master's degree in String Pedagogy from the University of Louisville where he studied with Stephan Mattingly.

Daniel recorded five videos during his first video shoot at GSI. In the first video, you can hear Scott Tennant's arrangement of a traditional Scottish song, "Wild Mountain Thyme". The guitar featured in the video is a 2002 Simon Ambridge SP/CSAR. This instrument has a beautiful, velvety, and lyrical sound perfect for this particular composition.

"Torija" is a short and gorgeous composition by Federico Moreno Torroba. It's part of the famous suite called "Castillos de España". Daniel recorded it on a 1999 German Vazquez Rubio "640" CD/PE. This is a 640-scale instrument made locally here in Los Angeles by German Vazquez Rubio. This guitar has fantastic playability, great sound, and very comfortable action.

Heitor Villa-Lobos' "Five Preludes (Cinq Préludes)" were written in 1940 and are the composer's final pieces written for solo guitar. Allegedly, originally there were six preludes, but the sixth one, which was described by Villa-Lobos as the finest of them all, is lost. Some people claim that the sixth prelude existed only in Villa-Lobos' imagination and is only a myth. There is also a possibility that the sixth prelude was destroyed together with Segovia's house during the Spanish Civil War. 

Daniel recorded two preludes from this set - No. 1 and 3 and he chose two excellent guitars for these compositions - a 2021 Claudio Meneghelli "Hommage to Jose Romanillos" SP/IN and 2023 Edmund Blöchinger "Llobet" SP/CSAR.

For his final piece, Daniel recorded the first movement, "El Arpa Del Guerrero" (The Harp of the Warrior) from Leo Brouwer's "El Decaméron Negro" (The Black Decameron). Brouwer wrote this piece in 1983 inspired by the 1910 collection of African folktales compiled by the German anthropologist, Leo Frobenius. The title, "El Decaméron Negro" comes from Giovanni Boccaccio's medieval compilation of folk stories. Daniel recorded this piece on a 2005 Sakurai-Kohno "Professional-J" SP/CSAR.