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Oye! What's your name? Where you from? Introduce yourself hombre!
So what's happening and this happens to everyone getting started in anything is you would like to run before you can walk. If you don't know what it is it's impossible to compose one. In fact even once you figure out what it is it will be a good while longer before you could compose one. My best definition would be, a falseta is a pretty little melody thing that fits in between dancing and singing or in the beginning of a song. Learn ****LOADS of pre-made ones and eventually you'll start kind of understanding the construction of them.
Sorry about that! Name is Daniel and I'm from California. I picked up the guitar about a year ago and just started taking flamenco lessons. Picking it up pretty good so far, but I know it's a long read ahead of me! I'm excited to continue my journey.
So far I have had lessons based on technique, compas, soleares, alegrias, and bulerias. My instructor informed me that we were going into falsetas next so I wanted to get more info on them/study up so I can go into the lesson with some background.
Just like Lenador said, the pretty little melody thing on the guitar
Take a listen to this (a solea since usually this is what students start with) and it should be pretty apparent:
The intro is some falsetas strung together with basic compas in the middle. For instance, the part from 0:47 to 0:54 could be a falseta in its own right. If you listen further, then you'll notice that most of what he's playing, as far as accompaniment goes, is basically just rhythm, with a few ornementations here and there. When the singer takes a break, either the guitarist just plays variations on basic compas, as he does here at 1:42 to 1:57 or he can play a falseta. In a sense, the main purpose of a falseta is basically just to be a filler for when the singer takes a break. This is what he does at 3:17. One variation on compas followed by a falseta (the falseta itself starts at 3;26, the first part being just a variation on compas). Where you play a falseta very much depends on the structure of the song (the lyrics) and to figure this out you really have to look into the structure of cante but to start what's important is just to be able to distinguish between accompaniment per se and falsetas. Falsetas are very elastic in that, as long as you follow the basic compas of the palo you're in, you can basically split a falseta in two, string it together with another, take a part of a solo guitar piece and use it as a falseta, etc. etc. Hope that helps some.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
I actually tried to do this on my own because I couldn't find someone around my area without going to Los Angeles. Didn't advance at all so I decided to go with lessons, which are proving to be extremely helpful since I learned more in 3 lessons than when I was trying to learn on my own.
I have a lot of flamenco friends down in the OC, oddly it does feel like all the dancers live down there and all the guitarists live up here lol but there are a couple really good players down there though, likely I'm thinking of your teacher. If you get on the naranjitas mailing list they'll keep you posted about shows down there. http://www.naranjitaflamenco.com
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