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Basic bulerías rhythm
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srshea
Posts: 833
Joined: Oct. 29 2006
From: Olympia, WA in the Great Pacific Northwest
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 RE: Basic bulerías rhythm (in reply to NormanKliman)
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Oh, man. Best news I’ve heard all week. 20 Cepero falsetas? Sign me up!
I’m in the process of changing banks, but once that’s taken care of I’ll be ordering that sucker, lo antes posible!
One question: I notice that you don’t note fingers/stroke-directions in the rasgeados (though I do see that you discuss some of this in the explanatory text), so I’m a little unclear as to how to interpret those. To use Cepero 2 as an example: would those last three rasgeados be two all-downstroke XAMIs and one XAMII, or two AMIIs and one XAMI, or something else?…..
Sorry, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to be more focused and disciplined in my right hand phrasing, after a lot of general winging it with inconsistent results, so, I’m trying not to leave things to chance any more…..
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Date Jun. 3 2009 15:47:25
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NormanKliman
Posts: 1143
Joined: Sep. 1 2007
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RE: Basic bulerías rhythm (in reply to srshea)
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Hi Adam,
I omitted the finger symbols from the transcriptions to make them easier to read, but the subject is covered in the introductory text and a chart with 16 kinds of rasgueados. I'll see if I can scan and post the chart as planned.
quote:
To use Cepero 2 as an example: would those last three rasgeados be two all-downstroke XAMIs and one XAMII, or two AMIIs and one XAMI, or something else?…..
Let's agree on the symbols first, just for the sake of clarity. I think you're using "X" for the little finger, and I use "e" for this.
The basic pattern always involves two index strokes:
(e)-a-m-i-i
The way to get this to fit is to make some of the rasgueados longer than the others. This is usually
a-m-i
i-a-m-i
i-a-m-i
i
over beats 7-10. So that'd be a triplet on beat 7, sixteenths on beats 8 and 9, and a final upstroke on beat 10. This is what most of them are doing most of the time. Parrilla didn't use his little finger, but Cepero might sometimes, as in the variation
a-m-i-i
a-m-i-i
e-a-m-i
i
or even
e-a-m-i
i-e-a-m-i
i-e-a-m-i
i
Parrilla sometimes used this variation
i-a-m-i
i-a-m-i
i-a-m-i
i
which is easy to recognize when you hear it, but he usually did it over beats 1-3 and 1-6 in two different ideas that are unlike the 7-10 cierre that we're talking about.
In a couple of cases I came across, the rasgueados start on beat 7.5, and this is indicated accordingly. In all the videos I've seen of Manuel Morao, he's using some kind of abanico pattern (with the thumb), but I've heard that he adopted it after injuring his hand and had been using an (e)-a-m-i-i pattern before that, presumably when he recorded with Terremoto and Paquera in the late 1950s. But his recordings with La Perla are from 1973, and he was probably using the abanico by that time.
So, in view of the possibilities, I've opted for a schematic representation of these kinds of rasgueados, using three beats of sixteenths for Morao, Cepero and others, and one beat of triplets and two beats of sixteenths for Parrilla. The chart I mentioned works out most of the more likely possibilities. I'll see if I can get it scanned and posted in the next few days, but I've been working on this and other things for over a year and am a little burned out, to tell you the truth! 
Just let me know if you have any more questions.
_____________________________
Be here now.
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Date Jun. 4 2009 0:11:51
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NormanKliman
Posts: 1143
Joined: Sep. 1 2007
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RE: Basic bulerías rhythm (in reply to NormanKliman)
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Okay, here are the rasgueados:
http://www.ctv.es/USERS/norman/rasgueados.htm
quote:
so, I’m trying not to leave things to chance any more…..
Ohhh, that sounds like no fun at all!  Seriously, if you don't mind my advice, the only thing that matters is whether or not something works. There are many different rasgueados (it's not like other techniques in that regard) and each person finds some are easier and others more difficult, so you take the ones that work best for you and end up doing things your own way. So, to develop rasgueados, most of your attention should be on your own playing, rather than on a theoretical idea like these transcriptions. That's just sort of a warning not to take them too seriously. The main ones to learn are a-m-i, i-a-m-i, i-a-m-i, i and its cousin that starts with the index upstroke (examples 4 and 15), and you take from there what works (along with abanico rasgueados, of course).
_____________________________
Be here now.
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Date Jun. 4 2009 6:30:05
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srshea
Posts: 833
Joined: Oct. 29 2006
From: Olympia, WA in the Great Pacific Northwest
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RE: Basic bulerías rhythm (in reply to NormanKliman)
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Good lord, thanks Norman! That’s a lot of work there, and I already felt like a bit of a pill asking for extra free info, so now I gotta order that thing!
Anyway, that’s all very helpful and makes things much more clear.
quote:
Seriously, if you don't mind my advice, the only thing that matters is whether or not something works......
Advice well taken, and that is essentially what I’m already doing. It’s just that there’s a very big “if” involved in the whether-or-not-something-works formula, and I’ve definitely fooled myself into thinking that certain things have worked in the past, when in reality I was just kind of faking it and getting by on luck. Hence the desire to be more exacting and planned out in what I do with the right hand….
I’ve been trying to get by on a minimal number of rasgeados, and have narrowed things down to amii and it’s variants, and the Marote stroke. I’ve also just recently started to get the hang of aii or iai, and this feels like a good alternative triplet for when the Marote stroke is too heavy. These are the ones that feel the most comfortable to me, and it makes sense at this point to just focus on really nailing this small handful of rasgeados, and learning to make them as all-purpose as possible, instead of spreading my efforts too thin by trying to learn every rasgeado under the sun. And those are actually the ones that make up the bulk of your rasgeado chart, so I guess I’m already on the right track!
Thanks again, and keep up the good work!
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Date Jun. 4 2009 14:21:25
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NormanKliman
Posts: 1143
Joined: Sep. 1 2007
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RE: Basic bulerías rhythm (in reply to Wannabee)
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quote:
I do have a few questions.....please excuse my ignorance:
Hi Wayne,
No such thing as a dumb question, at least not in what you're asking. I've been saying that I'm a little burned out, but I don't mind answering these questions at all. They provide me with feedback for future improvements.
quote:
When a chord (bflat) begins from ties (slur lines or whatever you call
them) and there is no note preceeding, does this mean just to hammer
the notes on with the left hand ?
Yes, exactly. It's a fine line, because on some recordings the guitarist's index finger is moving up and down but doesn't come into contact with the strings. So sometimes the slur is "launched" by the index stroke and sometimes it's just hammered (Cepero often hammers like that in his falsetas). In the rasgueado page, examples 1-3 build up to 4, and I should have done something similar with the golpe-index-slur "mechanism" found in most of the basic rhythms. In Cepero 1 (basic rhythm) there's a link to a more detailed explanation of the process, but I agree that it could be broken down into a better step-by-step explanation. I'll see what I can do.
quote:
Are the golpes all with the ring finger?
Yeah, whatever works. If you use your little finger for tapping, you'll subject your ring-finger nail to less stress, but it always felt weird to me, and I just learned to tap a little more carefully (after breaking the ring nail lots of times at parties). When the taps are part of the lashing "mechanism" described above, it's the ring finger (see Parrilla 1). For other kinds of taps, you can sometimes sneak in the side of your thumbnail on the upper tapping plate, but I don't do that on any of the basic rhythm examples.
In any case, if you find it hard to do the index downstroke and tap at the same time, work on that first (forget about the slurs for now). On beats 1 and 2, you extend your index finger for the downstroke (may or may not hit the strings) and retract your ring finger for the taps (extend=make it straight, retract=curl it in). Between the two (beat 1.5), you retract your index catching the treble string(s) and extend your ring to position it for the next tap. When I do this, my middle finger just kind of hangs there motionless through the process and my little finger is extended. So, the index and ring are moving abruptly in opposite directions at the same time. Use this mechanism whenever you see taps on beats 1 and 2 and treble strings between them. For example, Morao 4 isn't like that (it's all flicked index downstrokes). The movements of the index and ring fingers provide each other with rhythmic context, so think of it as a little dance for your right hand, rather than a series of movements that take place one after the other. The idea is to "dance" like this with your right hand to the rhythm of your tapping foot. For maximum effect, wiggle your ears while you're at it (I think Niño Ricardo even got his eyebrows into it...)
quote:
Some of the tied notes are a bit confusing to read, again please excuse my ignorance but why are they not indicated by longer note values as opposed to tied notes?
That was a constant to be dealt with in the transcriptions, along with deciding whether or not to use upper and lower beams in the same measure (appears in some falsetas in the collection). Sometimes the most logical notation represents less clearly what the right hand is doing. In the end, I settled on a compromise between representing certain ideas unambiguously and using the same system throughout, while avoiding cluttering up the score. When I could have used a longer note value and didn't, it's usually because of the way that the taps, slurs and index strokes play off of each other, forming the mechanism described above. Also, some people find dotted notes confusing, and in just a few examples I avoided using them, when the results weren't too awful looking. Now that you've pointed it out, though, I suppose that in Cepero 1, beats 5 and 6 could have been written as a dotted quarter note and an eighth note and it wouldn't have been that hard for some people to interpret. Another thing is that sometimes the use of a tie gets a note under the tap, rather than leaving the G symbol hanging in the air, but in Morao 3, for example, this would have resulted in a less desirable alternative, in my opinion.
The basic rhythms are an elementary part of playing bulerías, but there's nothing easy about them! Before you try to commit them to memory, you should be able to handle the simultaneous index downstrokes and tapping, as well as some of the rasgueados.
Everything about bulerías is twice as hard: twice as fast, twice the effort (?), twice the material to memorize... Javier Molina (1868-1956) said in an interview that sevillanas are the easiest and bulerías are the hardest.
Thanks to everyone else, BTW, for your comments. Ilia, that's fine by me, on this thread or a new one.
_____________________________
Be here now.
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Date Jun. 6 2009 0:55:32
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