NormanKliman -> RE: Basic bulerías rhythm (Jun. 6 2009 0:55:32)
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I do have a few questions.....please excuse my ignorance: Hi Wayne, No such thing as a dumb question, at least not in what you're asking. I've been saying that I'm a little burned out, but I don't mind answering these questions at all. They provide me with feedback for future improvements. quote:
When a chord (bflat) begins from ties (slur lines or whatever you call them) and there is no note preceeding, does this mean just to hammer the notes on with the left hand ? Yes, exactly. It's a fine line, because on some recordings the guitarist's index finger is moving up and down but doesn't come into contact with the strings. So sometimes the slur is "launched" by the index stroke and sometimes it's just hammered (Cepero often hammers like that in his falsetas). In the rasgueado page, examples 1-3 build up to 4, and I should have done something similar with the golpe-index-slur "mechanism" found in most of the basic rhythms. In Cepero 1 (basic rhythm) there's a link to a more detailed explanation of the process, but I agree that it could be broken down into a better step-by-step explanation. I'll see what I can do. quote:
Are the golpes all with the ring finger? Yeah, whatever works. If you use your little finger for tapping, you'll subject your ring-finger nail to less stress, but it always felt weird to me, and I just learned to tap a little more carefully (after breaking the ring nail lots of times at parties). When the taps are part of the lashing "mechanism" described above, it's the ring finger (see Parrilla 1). For other kinds of taps, you can sometimes sneak in the side of your thumbnail on the upper tapping plate, but I don't do that on any of the basic rhythm examples. In any case, if you find it hard to do the index downstroke and tap at the same time, work on that first (forget about the slurs for now). On beats 1 and 2, you extend your index finger for the downstroke (may or may not hit the strings) and retract your ring finger for the taps (extend=make it straight, retract=curl it in). Between the two (beat 1.5), you retract your index catching the treble string(s) and extend your ring to position it for the next tap. When I do this, my middle finger just kind of hangs there motionless through the process and my little finger is extended. So, the index and ring are moving abruptly in opposite directions at the same time. Use this mechanism whenever you see taps on beats 1 and 2 and treble strings between them. For example, Morao 4 isn't like that (it's all flicked index downstrokes). The movements of the index and ring fingers provide each other with rhythmic context, so think of it as a little dance for your right hand, rather than a series of movements that take place one after the other. The idea is to "dance" like this with your right hand to the rhythm of your tapping foot. For maximum effect, wiggle your ears while you're at it [:D](I think Niño Ricardo even got his eyebrows into it...) quote:
Some of the tied notes are a bit confusing to read, again please excuse my ignorance but why are they not indicated by longer note values as opposed to tied notes? That was a constant to be dealt with in the transcriptions, along with deciding whether or not to use upper and lower beams in the same measure (appears in some falsetas in the collection). Sometimes the most logical notation represents less clearly what the right hand is doing. In the end, I settled on a compromise between representing certain ideas unambiguously and using the same system throughout, while avoiding cluttering up the score. When I could have used a longer note value and didn't, it's usually because of the way that the taps, slurs and index strokes play off of each other, forming the mechanism described above. Also, some people find dotted notes confusing, and in just a few examples I avoided using them, when the results weren't too awful looking. Now that you've pointed it out, though, I suppose that in Cepero 1, beats 5 and 6 could have been written as a dotted quarter note and an eighth note and it wouldn't have been that hard for some people to interpret. Another thing is that sometimes the use of a tie gets a note under the tap, rather than leaving the G symbol hanging in the air, but in Morao 3, for example, this would have resulted in a less desirable alternative, in my opinion. The basic rhythms are an elementary part of playing bulerías, but there's nothing easy about them! Before you try to commit them to memory, you should be able to handle the simultaneous index downstrokes and tapping, as well as some of the rasgueados. Everything about bulerías is twice as hard: twice as fast, twice the effort (?), twice the material to memorize... Javier Molina (1868-1956) said in an interview that sevillanas are the easiest and bulerías are the hardest. Thanks to everyone else, BTW, for your comments. Ilia, that's fine by me, on this thread or a new one.
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