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Top Tips
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payaso
Posts: 85
Joined: Dec. 7 2014
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 RE: Top Tips (in reply to Brendan)
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Ten tips? Fools rush in, etc, so here are ten, in no particular order:
1. Decide what level of accomplishment you are aiming for and how much time you are going to devote to learning flamenco guitar – just to enjoy yourself, play for friends, for a dance class, to get gigs in a restaurant, with a singer, for a solo career etc. The popular idea that a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice are required to be really good at something may not be strictly true, but it’s probably a useful rough guide. But you can enjoy yourself, and perhaps even please people you play for, with very, very much less. Flamenco guitar doesn’t have to be a painfully hard slog.
2. Evaluate what it is you really like about flamenco guitar – the emotional intensity of the genre, the technical brilliance, the exciting rhythmic pulse, fast picado, expressing your inner gitano soul, the Andalusian culture, whatever. Work out how you can achieve what most appeals to you, then try and broaden your knowledge and appreciation.
3. Of course listen to as much flamenco as you can, in all its variety, components and epochs, but also listen to a great deal of other musical genres to become more knowledgeable about the role of melody, harmony, rhythm, emotional expressiveness etc.
4. Learn to read musical notation and tablature in order to make yourself more musically (and guitaristically) aware and literate.
5. Study how and why the essence of flamenco lies in the cante and how the guitar relates to that.
6. Evaluate in musical terms how flamenco guitar playing has been influenced by PDL and his successors, and how these changes have affected the aspirations of many younger guitar players and the type of audiences they appeal to.
7. If you’re quite serious about flamenco, try to find the funds to spend time in Spain to attend flamenco festivals, courses, peñas, etc.
8. Be sensitive and respectful to your audience. Not just the neighbours but people who voluntarily listen to your playing. Recognise that simpler things played well, with good compás and emotional depth, can be much more readily enjoyed by non-guitarists than fancier, more difficult things played less than perfectly (or maybe even perfectly…).
9. Learn as much as you can about the physical aspects and potential problems of playing and looking after yourself, your posture, your hands, your fingernails etc.
10. Don’t play too much (or at all?) for dancing if you really want to be an outstanding soloist. Your hands may suffer. Identify the guitarists who never play for dancers.
And an 11th. Please tune your guitar more carefully.
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Date May 31 2015 11:46:58
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Top Tips (in reply to Brendan)
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The idea of compiling a list of ten tips toward playing better flamenco strikes me as trite and superficial, like those books one finds in the "Self Help" and "Self Improvement" sections at bookstores. You know the kind, "Ten Tips toward a Better You," "Five Charactieristics of Successful Businessmen," "How to Win Friends and Influence People," and other such superficial reading for those who lack initiative and imagination. If you need to read such unimaginative nonsense, you probably lack what it takes in the first place, whether to play flamenco or to succeed in any other endeavor.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date May 31 2015 20:14:23
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Brendan
Posts: 353
Joined: Oct. 30 2010
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RE: Top Tips (in reply to Ricardo)
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All contributors will get a name-check, and there'll be a reference to the foro and this thread--all at the top. If a consensus emerges, we can do it as joint publication, like a scientific article--assuming everyone is happy with that. For example, it's already clear that one of the points will be: get into cante, bigtime. That is long-established common foro wisdom. If the other nine (or six or eleven) points are all like that, then a simple list of contributors may be fine.
On the other hand, it may be that someone feels himself to be in the unhappy position of the post-doc who did 90% of the work in return for an equal share of the credit with ten others. In which case, we talk our way to a solution.
Or maybe no consensus emerges (what? rancorous division? here?) in which case I guess I could credit individual points with individual names. But that would be rather fiddly for a listicle in a newsletter.
I will give credit to all helping hands, but I'd rather not be the first person to publish a piece in Flamenco News with extensive endnotes.
Another possibility is for one person to take on the job single-handed. That's a bigger favour than I was planning to ask, but it would resolve all ambiguity about who contributed what.
In any case, both this thread and Flamenco News are squarely in the public domain, so my chances of pulling a fast one are slim.
And big thanks to Payaso, for throwing down his list early doors and taking the predictable flak.
_____________________________
https://sites.google.com/site/obscureflamencology/
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Date Jun. 1 2015 17:17:21
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Morante
Posts: 2178
Joined: Nov. 21 2010
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RE: Top Tips (in reply to Ricardo)
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quote:
The end.
Next question?
Everything is going in the same direction: we used to have Terremoto, Rancapino, El Torta etc, now we have lightweight cantaores singing canciones por bulerias y tangos. In Blues, we had Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf, now we have talented musicians such as Robrt Cray or Robben Ford writing little songs por blues
Motorcycle racing used to be on great street circuits such as Dundrod, Isle of Man, Nuremburgring. Now enclosed in Mickey Mouse circuits with 50 metre runoffs, where the promoters can charge entrance to every spectator.
We have flamenco light, blues light, motorcycles light, Coca Cola light,
Thankfully we still have toros: you can´t have toros light, you either have them or you don´t.
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Date Jun. 1 2015 18:48:33
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payaso
Posts: 85
Joined: Dec. 7 2014
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RE: Top Tips (in reply to Brendan)
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Thank you, Brendan, for your generous comment. The use of a mirror is a really excellent tip, which I did not include because I have seen it recommended in a method book, and you had set yourself the difficult task of finding things that you won’t find in books. But who cares? The same can be said for my very unoriginal remark about the fundamental importance of the cante, but it’s so crucial that it’s always worth repeating, and it’s good to see the acknowledged cante expert Morante emphasizing the point even more strongly. My remark about the possible risk of excessive playing for dancing was ridiculed by jshelton5040. I’m afraid I didn’t make myself clear. Of course very many great players have played for dancing and Sabicas’ remark about the ideal pathway for a would-be soloist is very well known. I was first alerted to the possible danger by D.E.Pohren who described the incapacitating damage to his third finger – and I had understood that PdL’s father forbad him to play for dancers I think some fine players prefer not to play for dancing, but I may well be mistaken. BarkellWH disapproves of lists of tips, as unimaginative, superficial and trite, so perhaps your 10th tip should be a challenging paradox – avoid all tips and rely on your initiative and imagination. Perhaps if you asked people to name their five favourite tips you might get more responses from the usually generous and helpful members of the foro – and surely no credits needed. It’s hard to see that educational tips can be both superficial nonsense and at the same time so precious and special that they can only be imparted with the promise of acknowledgment.
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Date Jun. 5 2015 18:41:50
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Brendan
Posts: 353
Joined: Oct. 30 2010
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RE: Top Tips (in reply to payaso)
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Right so. I took Payaso's list, tinkered with it, tried it on some friends and tweaked it some more. It remains, of course, superficial and derivative--it is a listicle to appear in a newsletter. Anything deep or original would violate the norms of the genre.
Payaso: to be fair to our detractors, the accusation of superficiality and the anxiety about attribution came from different quarters, so no individual is guilty of contradiction.
Tips for beginning flamenco guitarists
There are no original ideas on this list. These are all suggestions that you will hear eventually if you play flamenco guitar for long enough. Thanks for help in compiling this list go to the participants in the Foro Flamenco (www.foroflamenco.com) and the London School of Flamenco Guitar Seville 2015 field trip. Special thanks to Foro member Payaso, who provided a list of tips on which this is based.
1. Soak yourself in flamenco singing. Cante is the roots and trunk of flamenco. Flamenco guitar originated as accompaniment to Cante and takes its style and structure from song. This, rather than any of the distinctive techniques, is what makes flamenco guitar flamenco. It's possible to play flamenco on the piano or the saxophone, provided you stick to the forms and rules established in Cante. Guitar-playing that ignores those rules is not flamenco, no matter how much rasgueado and alzapua it has. So learn to appreciate flamenco Cante for its own sake. Listen to lots of it, old and new.
2. Use what you know about other styles of music. Your wider musical knowledge will help you to understand what makes flamenco distinctive. Besides, flamenco may have grown in the soil of Andalusia, but its heartland has a sea-coast with major ports such as Cadiz and Malaga. Flamenco has always been open to other influences, including Spanish folk music such as Sevillanas, styles from the Americas (notably the palos de ida y vuelta), and now flamenco artists collaborate freely with every possible genre of music. Flamenco is different to other kinds of music, but it isn't completely alien. Besides, if you want to play the purest flamenco, you will need a wider view to decide what ‘pure’ means.
3. Learn some music theory. A basic understanding of chord construction and function will help you to learn new material faster and remember it for longer. Patterns familiar from other genres, such as secondary dominants and the circle of fourths, are present in flamenco and it is useful to recognise them.
4. Don't get hung up on theory. This is not jazz. Flamenco guitarists traditionally learned by copying, and did not elaborate general notions about harmony or composition. Some flamencos still speak proudly of having never had a formal lesson, of having learned their craft from family elders or from the street.
5. Don't try to learn from exclusively from books and the Internet. Like all traditional music, flamenco has subtleties of rhythm and tone that cannot be written down. Its techniques require precise hand positions that books cannot convey. You need someone to correct your bad habits. Go to a teacher.
6. Read books. There are some excellent tutorial books, collections of falsetas, scores of long pieces and written discussions of flamenco style and harmony. Besides, making your own transcriptions can be very instructive. Traditional flamencos did not learn from books, but those of us who were not born into a flamenco family need the extra help that books provide.
7. Practice in front of a mirror. Check that your positions and motions are correct. Look for superfluous movement and signs of tension. Striking or plucking a string requires a brief moment of muscle-tension. It is essential that the muscle you just used relaxes fully afterwards. Video yourself playing so that you can analyse at leisure.
8. Practice with your eyes shut. Rely on your senses of touch, position and movement to know where your hands are relative to the guitar. When you play with others, you will need to look away from your hands to know what is going on and what is about to happen. So teach your hands to find their way without your eyes helping.
9. Play for dancers. Outside Spain, dance classes are the most common form of flamenco activity. Sitting in with an experienced guitarist is essential at first, but there is no substitute for accompanying a dance class on your own. You will quickly learn to anticipate what the dancers will do and you will learn to communicate with dancers, who have their own idiom and don't normally speak guitarist.
10. Don't play for dancers without proper amplification. Three dancers in dance shoes on a dance floor will easily drown your guitar, and if you strain to play louder, you may injure yourself. The flamenco writer and guitarist Donn Pohren permanently damaged his hand this way. Since his day, small, lightweight and cheap amplifiers have become available. Buy one.
11. Do all your daily drills to a metronome. This builds accuracy and discourages cheating. Don't neglect your left hand, and make a special effort to develop its third and fourth fingers.
12. If you're at a stage where any of these tips are useful, you're playing your guitar for fun. Don't allow tips 1-11 to interfere with that.
_____________________________
https://sites.google.com/site/obscureflamencology/
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Date Sep. 18 2015 13:49:44
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