Behind the Scenes: Cavatina for Guitar and Cello

If you watched my solo guitar video of Cavatina, you may remember that I asked whether you thought the piece would work as a duet. The response was an overwhelming yes, so I set to work on an arrangement and reached out to Kaitlyn Raitz for the collaboration.

Cavatina is our ninth collaboration. My first project with Kaitlyn, an extraordinarily talented cellist based in Nashville, was an arrangement of Granada by Albéniz in January of 2022. We have been working together remotely ever since, typically on a couple of pieces each year. The remote collaboration process is straightforward: I record my part, send Kaitlyn the score and a guide track, she records her part in Nashville, and I combine the two in post-production.

The recording setup for this piece was quite different from the solo Cavatina video. For the solo version I used my AKG C451B matched stereo pair in an AB configuration in my loft. For the duet, both Kaitlyn and I recorded our parts dry and in mono , in acoustically dead environments, so that I could place us both in the same space in post. I used my hand-built Mic-Parts 12-251 tube condenser microphone for the guitar, a mic I assembled myself from a kit. To create the sense of a shared room, I used the LiquidSonics Seventh Heaven reverb plug-in, which allowed me to put both instruments in a convincing acoustic space even though we recorded thousands of miles apart.

The sheet music for my arrangement is available for free on the sheet music page if you would like to explore it yourself.

I hope you enjoy the duet as much as I enjoyed putting it together. Thank you for watching , and for those of you who answered yes to the duet question, I hope this delivers.