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I have always been a metronome guy but have incorporated playing with compas loops too.
I have seen that for more intuitively phrased falsetas like the ones by PDL, playing with compas loops is not difficult once I have already practiced the falseta a good amount with the metronome.
But for highly syncopated falsetas and falsetas with 'unintuitive' rhthym, I find it difficult to play with compas loops.
Right now, my strategy is to choose a few 'checkpoints' in the falseta. For example, if a particular note in the falseta falls on a beat like 6, 8 or 10, I keep a check when playing whether my playing coincides with the compas loop.
The rest, I rely on intuition and filling gaps with small upstrokes. Is this a good approach? Do you need to keep track of every single beat while playing?
What I mean by unintuitive and intuitive: if you have learnt PDL's falsetas, then you might have seen how his falseta 'sings' with the compas. Contrarily, highly syncopated falsetas don't have this 'singing' thing going on with their rhythm. Or maybe I am not advanced enough to feel their singing, I could be wrong.
The rest, I rely on intuition and filling gaps with small upstrokes. Is this a good approach? Do you need to keep track of every single beat while playing?
You should at least understand the need to keep track of every beat and every subdivision in-between, very precisely and lucidly. Over time you won't need to do that and just "feel it", but even the top dogs have the odd ball phrase they created from intuition that was simply off mathematically. That is because they only feel subdivision and accents and don't intellectualize the counts. There are examples especially in bulerías of odd 3 count phrases resulting in ambiguous 9 or 15 count compás expressions, by Niño Ricardo, Sabicas, Manuel Morao (more so in Siguiriyas than bulería), Niño Miguel, even Paco de Lucía, probably others that I don't know about. Moraito was in a master class where he could not get the math straight on an old siguiriya thing that was simply off mathematically. There is also a 14 count fandango phrase I first heard from Felix de Utrera that is repeated often by Moraito.
So feeling it intuitively is the ultimate goal, but it can also fool even the best that everything is "correct" simply because it "feels correct". As a teacher of this stuff, when a student wants one of those ambiguous ones I have to take liberty to correct it so it works out either as a half of whole compás, and make them aware what exactly I changed (added or subtracted something) for the sake of authenticity.
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