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Miguel
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Miguel de Maria
Posts: 3532
Joined: Oct. 20 2003
From: Phoenix, AZ
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 RE: Miguel (in reply to Patrick)
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Patrick you lurker! :) I sometimes post guitar-related material over here, because I don't get a lot of feedback on that kind of thing. Over there, it's more about guitar, not flamenco... but here it is:
To be a good player, you must learn to practice and to play courageously. Courage is essential to building skill.
This operates on many levels, but I want to talk about the baseline level of learning a particular passage or lick on the guitar. Even this simple act requires courage.
The old way of education would not say that it requires courage to practice a lick or a passage. The average person believes that repetition--or even talent--is all that is needed. But this error accounts for a lot of wasted time.
The human mind is not a computer. Keep in mind that intuition and emotions are just as much a part of the normal functionality of the brain as our prized logic and rational analysis. To ignore the former functions is to chain your mind and cut its efficiency drastically.
I once took a course in riding motorcyles and a great piece of advice was given to me. If there is an obstacle in the road and you want to avoid it, don't look at the obstacle, look at the clear path, where you want to go. If you look at obstacle, you will tend to hit the obstacle. I have witnessed the same phenomenon with my bad basketball shot. I learned to shoot by looking at the front of the rim. Guess where most of my shots go? Yes, I usually miss by hitting the front of the rim. Why would the shots go anywhere else?
We must take into account this basic behavoir and characteristic of the brain when we practice. To ignore it is to court disaster!
Take a position shift, something out of our comfort zone. We practice it a few times and don't get it right. A position shift is a tough thing to do, it requires a leap of faith. Like landing a plane on an aircraft carrier, either you land right or you don't. If you miss the shift, you get bad notes, if you hit the shift, you get sweet notes. Now the problem is, it's very easy, instead of thinking about our target, the sweet notes, to think about the possibility of missed notes. Instead of thinking about where our hand should be, we think about where it might be if we mess up. We tense, we hedge our bets a little, maybe we flatten our fingers to make it more likely we can sort of hit the right notes even if we miss...
This is no way to play a position shift. The right way is to acquaint yourself with it. Go to it and play it right, the way you want it to feel. Sweet. Feel it in your fingertips, feel the weight of your arm, squeeze a little bit and feel the wood. That's how it should feel. The next step is to get out of the damn way and let your brain tell your body how to get there.
We will need to do some intermediate steps. Do it very slow a few times. Always focus on teh target. The sweet notes are a bullseye, and the shift is a release of an arrow. After letting go of the arrow, we don't mess around with the arrow--it just goes. We aim and let the laws of physics take over. We need to take the same attitude with our shift.
It will take a certain amount of repetitions for you to be able to do the shift in time. This will depend on your experience with shifts and with the guitar in general. But if you practice the correct motions, with an emphasis on the target, the goal, and steadfastly blocking any thought of bad notes or of missing out of your mind, the incredible, unparelleled thing sitting between your ears--yes, your brain--will do the rest. You have to trust it. Don't try to control it, anymore than you need to control an arrow once it has left the bow.
Do you see what I mean about courage? It takes courage because you have to fight negative thoughts about failure. You have to force yourself not to think about failure, to be brave enough to let the bad notes come....but if you try to control the muscles and take over, then you will simply be handcuffing your natural abilities.
Be courageous in your practice, find the goal, find out how it feels, and then just do it! Clear your mind of clutter. Be Zen. Shoot the arrow...and let it sail straight to the target!
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date May 4 2004 3:38:49
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Patrick
Posts: 1189
Joined: Jul. 7 2003
From: Portland, Oregon
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RE: Miguel (in reply to Patrick)
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Eddie,
I pulled out the same CD you mentioned. I agree that it was a bit hard to tell how good Manolo was from these cuts. From what I can hear, I was not overly impressed.
What I did want to talk about was the guitars these guys recorded with. Now granted, recording technology was pretty grim compared to now. But man, some of the guitars I hear on older recordings sounded IMO terrible!
The guitar Melchor de Marchena used on this CD was one of the most unpleasant, abrasive guitars I have heard and the one Nino Ricardo used wasn't much better. I think it's easy to dismiss this as being old recordings, but if you listen to Sabicas on the same CD it's like night and day. In fact the Sabicas cuts were done in the 50's and that guitar sounds phenomenal compared to the others.
I guess the question is, was this the accepted tone of what a good flamenco guitar was to be like back then, because I'm telling you, it ain't today?
Pat
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date May 6 2004 18:57:38
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eslastra
Posts: 134
Joined: Jul. 12 2003
From: Livermore, CA USA
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RE: Miguel (in reply to Patrick)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Patrick
Eddie,
I pulled out the same CD you mentioned. I agree that it was a bit hard to tell how good Manolo was from these cuts. From what I can hear, I was not overly impressed.
What I did want to talk about was the guitars these guys recorded with. Now granted, recording technology was pretty grim compared to now. But man, some of the guitars I hear on older recordings sounded IMO terrible!
The guitar Melchor de Marchena used on this CD was one of the most unpleasant, abrasive guitars I have heard and the one Nino Ricardo used wasn't much better. I think it's easy to dismiss this as being old recordings, but if you listen to Sabicas on the same CD it's like night and day. In fact the Sabicas cuts were done in the 50's and that guitar sounds phenomenal compared to the others.
I guess the question is, was this the accepted tone of what a good flamenco guitar was to be like back then, because I'm telling you, it ain't today?
Pat
Patrick,
I agree the audio fidelity of a lot of those old recordings is pretty terrible, even with todays's efforts to remaster and clean them up. The Ramon Montoya recordings are another example of this. These old recording were cut on 78 RPM discs. So you can't do too much more to improve the sound. Sabicas had the benefit of better recording facilities since his recordings were done in major American recording studios such as Decca, ABC/Paramount, and Columbia. I don't recall if he had any early solo recordings ever cut on 78's. I know of a 78 RPM Carmen Amaya collection that may have had Sabicas as accompanist. She usually had a troup of 4 to 5 guitarists backing her up from what I can see in her old movie cuts.
All of the old era guitars (pre-1950's Santos, Barbero, Esteso, etc) that I've had a chance to play have an nasal old woody tone that's hard to totally describe. I consistently hear this tone quality in all the old recordings though, so that must have been the tonal preference of the day. Actually, I kind of like it. A couple of Shelton-Farreta guitars I've played recently have successfully duplicated this tone quality. I do wonder how nice these old guitars might have sounded with today's recording technology. I think players like Marchena and Ricardo had to play with a heavy attack since good amplication was not readily available. Their beat up guitars sure showed it  In contrast, Sabicas' guitars always look new and shiny.  There is no doubt that of all the old era players, Sabicas was definitely the most technically polished. But Ricardo and Marchena's playing had a raw primal gutsiness that was muy flamenco. I think PdL was one who was able to capture the best qualities of these old players.
_____________________________
Eddie Lastra
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date May 6 2004 23:21:29
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It's those 'little things' within the techniques that add to the flamenco sound. 
