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Posts: 2537
Joined: Jan. 30 2007
From: London (the South of it), England
El Mirador - Chicuelo
Hello chums,
Can anyone offer an opinion?
Tried over the years to transcribe this. Or at least parts of it.
but.... I'm not savvy enough to know if this is A. played without capo, open E (regular tuning) and opening falseta played up at fret 7,8,9 area (or regular tuning falseta played infrets 234.) or B. tuned down to D and played capo at 2nd fret with opening falseta played por medio?
Ive never found any hint of a video of this piece. (could be one out there though) I suppose I could transcribe either way but dont want to get into pickle later on in the piece.
maybe I've over complicated it? Anyone know what the tuning is on this piece please? Regular or Drop D (urgh hate that term)
Sounds like Granaina (B phrygian) with drop B. Like my Tangos here:
At 3:36 I am up in 7th position but get those deep bass notes.
Due to the impracticality of dropping that E down to B in a concert situation, I reworked this piece into standard tuning. It might be worth to consider transcribing Chicuelo’s piece in Standard for this reason…lower bass notes (only BCD range are lost) are not worth the tuning issues.
Funny, I never uploaded that. Some robot does it I guess.
Not sure if you even know what that means exactly, but I produced it. The recording engineer was ToddK from the foro here. I basically trusted his opinion on most things, but in the end I had final decision making. Our only argument really was about compression levels (I wanted considerable less than he was used to). I respected his opinion so I did a blind test on 10 people. It was equal split in terms of preferences, so we went with less compression to make ME happy.
Funny on my phone I heard some deep notes on the Chicuelo recording. Must have been an artifact.
There is a nationally (internationally?) syndicated classical guitar program produced here in Austin, which plays on the local classical music station. Either the program or the station-or both-uses so much compression that the guitar sounds like some kind of alien instrument made of cheap plastic.
I used to love compression in the past when I would use it destructively in post, but now I hate it when it's used live or non-destructively in post.
Same here! i used to like using it (not that I record much at all) and now I hate it! Guess at first I didn't appreciate the subtleties that compression destroys
Stu,
Yeah its weird I've never seen a video of Chicuelo playing this piece. In an interview he said he named it after the housing development he was living in lol. When that album came out I was trying to transcribe the first falseta and then lost interest
The big thing for me at the time, was the arpegio buleria stuff. I had worked so hard at trying to develop this dynamic thing that Nuñez had that was incredible in terms of expression with the arpegio falsetas. His albums have post mastering that squashes those dynamics flat, and makes him sound like a type writer, nothing at ALL like it sounds in a classroom. People accused him back then of being a “robot” technician and I realized that was a huge part of it. His album Calima was pretty weak but at least in the guitar solos the dynamics jump out despite the audio having perhaps too much reverb and quiet overall output. That album is the only one that he got an award for and he was surprised as heck because it was rehashed music…but I suspect those little dynamics made a difference. Even PDL approached Nuñez at a function and complimented him on that disc (and he was like Really??LOL). Andando is some of his best music, but too much compression. That is not at all how he played that stuff. The buleria for example “Samaruco” is the same one with very low compression on Jazzmenco 2. Huge difference to me, but weaker volume output.
So I heard myself with the heavy compression and my guitar playing sounded in your face explosion typewritter precision thing which I can’t even do if I wanted to. It was ridiculous, and “amazing”, but simply not “me”. I wanted to get those dynamics back, just for myself. ToddK and I argued a lot about it, to the point he had to admit the only way Vicente was achieving his dynamics was by riding the fader in post (claiming Vicente Vivencias is using same compression levels as my recording). I totally don’t believe that, I think Vicente just used a limiter and let the low amplitudes drop WAY down below the threshold of normal high compression stuff. At least going in. What happens is when you play soft notes on purpose, the compression raises them WAY up to the volume of a rasgueado, which is also squashed down with golpes. Now golpes are obnoxious if you don’t limit them at least…so in the end my disc went out with limiting and very little compression pushing up the quiet stuff (the rumba for example already had more than I wanted going straight in which I couldn’t do anything about in post, without a total redo.).
For comparison:
Crank your volume for this:
And turn this one down to match the above:
The best I have is on this DVD (with surround sound it is amazing) from this TV show, the same piece. I can’t find it online but here you can hear with this other piece the amazing wide dynamics and how the music pops out:
Either the program or the station-or both-uses so much compression that the guitar sounds like some kind of alien instrument made of cheap plastic.
Compression suppresses dynamics, so making a “flat” performance loud like a Trash Compactor. The “Alien” sound is modern Dolby style digital noise reduction. It used to only muffle the sound back in the cassette days. Even then I made sure to always disable that crap. These morons actually believe that the high Z “hiss” is so amateur sounding that they will filter it out and ruin all the upper harmonics of the guitar. These algo rhythms are really only for human voice to sound clear (same built in filters on the Zoom calls etc.) They treat the guitar like “back ground noise”. The worst is all those digitized cante albums of old where the guitar has utterly disappeared from the spectrum. If I don’t hear “hiss” on recordings today, I know it is a fake Shyte sound coming up, no matter when it was recorded. I am so thankful the new Saturday Night in San Fran that Al dimeola produced has tons of hiss.
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