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Hi, if anyone wants technique exercises for ANY aspect of the guitar, I will send you them in tablature (guitar pro, jpg, whatever). I spent years of my god damn life doing nothing but this, so it actually interests me to a degree that is probably not healthy. I have enough technical exercises that I can practice for 8 hours without playing the same exercise twice.
Have strength, but don't use it. Everything symmetrical. Rasgeos will make your picado faster. Picado with M and A will make your arpeggios better. Speed equals relaxation. Technique is all in the mind.
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Sometimes music is all you got in this world. Why do I create music? Because there was a time when I had nothing, and music kept me alive.
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to guitarristamadrid)
ola amigo , i was just thinking i need to get into it, id love to know how its going in madrid, just being in Granada they were doing lots of technique there its really cool.
please share ur ideas amigo , any tabs are cool, i can practice before i get to Madrid.
hope its all going well, G.Nunex dvd still scares me !!
Posts: 3055
Joined: Aug. 30 2008
From: Boston, MA, U.S.A
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to guitarristamadrid)
Hey Evan, it'd be really cool if you could just post some of your favorite, most effective exercises here on the foro. a lot could benefit from it and it'd probably save you some time by not having to send the same thing out to a bunch of a different people.
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to guitarristamadrid)
Evan,
It would be great if you could post some of your exercises here. But having read that you could play them 8 hours a day without repeating yourself, I have to advise you against doing so much. An hour or 1,5 hours is plenty. When you mostly do exercises it never brings you satisfaction, because you feel like you are ready and your exercises sound and feel great, but you can't use any of them in your playing, as they are disconnected from the music. Doing your exercises you can become a perfect robot with no musical expression, because your fingers are programmed to do the same thing all over. Play and work on repertoire instead and it will satisfy you so much more.
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to Grisha)
Sup Grisha, yeah that's why Entri himself says the thing about dividing your time equally between technique, repertoire and creation.
But that being said, I am an extreme addictive **** who hits the punching bag in the gym so hard that i split all my knuckles open, but I don't care because I am training power on that day, and on a different day I will work on nuance
So, that's why if you go to my myspace page, you see that the music I actually play is really not that focused on technique at all, it's about the development of interesting musical ideas, becuase that's the phase i'm in right now.
I essentially apply Entri's philosophy like this:
-Spend 2 years obsessed with technique, playing eight hours a day of just repetitive exercises -Spend 2 years obsessed with musical idea development, spending eight hours a day practicing every possible method of developing themes and structures -Spend 2 years not even giving a **** about music, just having girlfriends and working out and making money
So I'm basically insane, but hey, it's my style.
_____________________________
Sometimes music is all you got in this world. Why do I create music? Because there was a time when I had nothing, and music kept me alive.
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to guitarristamadrid)
quote:
-Spend 2 years obsessed with technique, playing eight hours a day of just repetitive exercises -Spend 2 years obsessed with musical idea development, spending eight hours a day practicing every possible method of developing themes and structures -Spend 2 years not even giving a **** about music, just having girlfriends and working out and making money
why would you do that? being obsessed with something for 2 years wont make you any better at it, also because its better to "practise" twice a half hour a day, then a hour straight.
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to guitarristamadrid)
quote:
So I'm basically insane,
Yeah, im getting that sense.
I think you'll end up hurting yourself very soon. You seem very impetuous. In practicing and your posts. Dont forget about patience and restraint.\ Good luck.
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to ToddK)
Well, let's give the guy a chance folks and not pre-judge first.
I've PMed guitarrista and he has kindly agreed to post some vids of typical cañoroto style playing, which I don't know about y'all, but I'm looking forward to seeing anyway.
So let's not make guitarrista feel unwelcome or anything por favor.
The guy is new here so let's at least give him a chance to contribute his knowledge he has accumulated in living in Madrid and attending the cañoroto school.
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to Ron.M)
quote:
he guy is new here so let's at least give him a chance to contribute his knowledge he has accumulated in living in Madrid and attending the cañoroto school.
I dont think anyone's trying to thwart his contributions.
I think we're just saying, moderation is very important, and its easy to let obsession get the best of you in an unproductive way, and you can go overboard and hurt yourself. Nobody wants to see that happen.
Grisha has been there. He's been down that road, and hurt himself. And he had been physically conditioned from an extremely young age, which speaks volumes. He is a less likely candidate than guitarrista. So when you see somebody like Guitarissta maniacally blasting 8 hours a day, its definately a cause for concern. I dont think anybody can honestly deny that.
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to ToddK)
Hi Todd! Don't worry about me, I've been doing this for years. While playing this much certainly isn't for everyone, it is my job right now, and it's one I'm very happy with. I built this tolerance up slowly over time. I don't suggest you try to do it overnight.
Marathon runners, professional fighters, staring at a computer screen 10 hours a day... there are risks in everything, and my personal philosophy is to accept the risk, accept the consequences. It makes you feel truly alive.
My whole life, I don't think I ever backed down from doing something just because it was hard, others told me it was impossible, or it had never been done before. In fact, I have done one thing after another that people told me was impossible.
After I succeeded, people would often say things like "We supported you all along"
You know what Ramama Maharshi said once? "The idea of difficulty is itself wrong. It will not help you gain what you seek."
_____________________________
Sometimes music is all you got in this world. Why do I create music? Because there was a time when I had nothing, and music kept me alive.
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to yohan)
Hi Yohan! It is my personal experience that being obsessed with things actually does cause you to get them. If I look back at my life, all the things I was obsessed with, I got. Desire is basically a form of creative energy.
When you don't get something, it's because you didn't truly want it, so you accepted a reality where you didn't have it.
As to the practicing many hours, I just found that that was necessary in order to play the way I wanted to play.
Anyway, I thought I'd give some examples from things I have learned living here.
After I had been in Spain for not too long, I met a number of people who knew or had known Paco, Sabicas, Gerardo, etc. They all said these guys would practice for many hours every day. Pedro of Pedro de Miguel guitarras told me that he once saw Sabicas play for seven hours straight, after which he congratulated him for his dedication. Sabicas laughed and said "Eso no es estudiar" (implying that seven hours wasn't that much)
Entri has told me a number of stories about Paco where the guy just practiced obscene amounts of hours, blowing off all kinds of social events and other things in order to play picado exercises. One morning after a concert series had just ended Paco was apparently awake at the hotel at 7am sharp, practicing slow scales out on the balcony. Entri's brother, who was on tour with him, told him to stop and come inside and sleep, to which Paco said "Have you seen how our uncle Sabicas used to play? We can never stop practicing"
Entri told me that Canizares went through a period where he was obsessed with picado, and he practiced for one year, eight hours a day, just playing picado. After that there was some flamenco event where all the famous players met up (forget the details) and Entri said Canizares was playing better than everyone else.
Gerardo at one point apparently spent all his time in a bar in Madrid which had a sort of cave underneath it, and he would just practice all day long there and the bartender would bring him down food. Before this he wasn't as successful a player as he is now, but he reached some point where he got really serious about it and started going down to the cave and working on technique constantly, and after that was when his career really took off.
_____________________________
Sometimes music is all you got in this world. Why do I create music? Because there was a time when I had nothing, and music kept me alive.
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to guitarristamadrid)
I respect your insights evan. Obsession does get you somewhere. It gets you what you want to achieve. I was once a violin major and my teacher had me play nothing but La, Si, Do, Si for 6 months. Thats all I did. All my classmates were already doing sonatas with a different teacher but I was only working on tone.
1 year later he said I was ready. And not to brag but my playing was cleaner than everybody else. I got obsessed with good tone. I practiced so much... But once I got in the zone I coudnt stop practicing.
I wish I could go back there with flamenco. But Its all good, the discipline I still have. One of my teachers studied with the Caño Roto guys and he taught me a lot of technique exercises. I love them. They work.
Right now I have enough to keep my fingers nimble but when I run out of material... I will contact you and hopefully your generous desire to share your techniques are still around :)
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to guitarristamadrid)
quote:
Hi, if anyone wants technique exercises for ANY aspect of the guitar, I will send you them in tablature (guitar pro, jpg, whatever). I spent years of my god damn life doing nothing but this, so it actually interests me to a degree that is probably not healthy. I have enough technical exercises that I can practice for 8 hours without playing the same exercise twice.
Yes please, i want it, you ve got acces to sources i dream off with all the cano roto guys, so fu*k yeah ! ...thank you for beeing generous man its very nice of you
i want any or all the exercises for any technique u got from any of this guys, whatever u are happy to share
RE: Anyone want technique exercises?... (in reply to guitarristamadrid)
Ok I created a gp5 file of an arpeggio exercise, and I uploaded it to the tabs forum, but when I download it back onto my computer gp5 won't open it. Do others have this problem as well?
_____________________________
Sometimes music is all you got in this world. Why do I create music? Because there was a time when I had nothing, and music kept me alive.
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