Campanella: How To Use This Guitar Technique

Here’s a cool concept that blew me away when I was first introduced to it: the Campanella guitar technique.

It’s mind-blowing because it opens up many possibilities for seeing and using the guitar differently. Also, it’s a counterintuitive way of playing the guitar, which gives us a cool challenge.

In Italian, Campanella translates to “little bell.” In the classical guitar world, it means playing scales with open strings in a way that makes a few notes resonate together, like playing tuned bells…

This way, a simple scale can sound like a harmony of vibrating notes. Using this technique, you’re exploiting the advantage of how the guitar is structured and tuned! Unlike a piano, for example, you can play the same note (same pitch) on various strings and frets.

Here are three options to play Campanella over the G major scale in a descending way:

How do you compose using the Campanella guitar technique?

The Campanella technique is more than just playing a scale. What I really love most about it is that it enables us to compose beautiful melodies.

How to compose music with Campanella? One idea you can try is to select 3-6 notes from the Campanella in G above. Then, play them repeatedly to create a beautiful ringing sequence, then reorder the notes, add variations, and expand it.

This simple improvisation-based composition formula works. Try it! If you’d like, share your result with me. I’d love to listen to it!

I hope this helps you play the guitar more creatively. Let me know if this helped in the comments below!

You’re also welcome to join my new guitar composition community on Skool, where I share more tutorials and tips on improvisation and composing on guitar.

Want the PDF?

I have a PDF of the above images you can print, and also have other cool, creative guitar lessons – comment below or send me an email if you’d like me to send them over to you.