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estebanana -> RE: how to create a falseta (Jan. 20 2013 22:54:02)
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Whoa!
I know how you make falsetas. And it's not easy, but not impossible. Some ideas:
Listen to cante and try to imitate the voice line in a melody on guitar try to harmonize with it in some way on other strings. Try to count it out in compas and do the best you can to get it in compas.
Then take it to your teacher or a friend who is a good guitarist and show it to them an both of you tweak it around and work it over. That is what Gitano guitarists have done for generations.
Work for general rough ideas and refine it later. Or noodle around on the guitar and find interesting little riffs you makeup yourself and try to work those into compas.
If you are working in say Solea por arriba, learn the E Phrygian scale. Take that scale and try to sound out a singers melody with that scale and learn which chords go with which sections of the melody.
Here is the thing, in music you should try to work on your own ways of improvisation and composition right from the beginning. But while you do that show your ideas to your teachers. If you find a teacher not open to that keep that teacher if they teach well in other ways, but find one who is interested in looking at your own ideas. You will reinvent the wheel a couple times, but in the end you will not have reservations about making our own music.
You may come up with an idea that you revisit in two years and right now you may not be able to fully musically articulate it, but if you keep journals in tab or notation or quick recordings of your ideas, later you may be able to develop them. I have notebook with sketches of things I would have forgotten if I had not jotted them down.
Get a recorder and listen to yourself play when you make up ideas or record the fragments of ideas that are noodling little riffs.
Composing right from the beginning is a form of ear training, and I have had several teachers who were more or less conservative, but they encouraged spending some time making up small passages on my own. Use making up falsetas as a way to listen more deeply.
Ask questions about different players strategies in making falsetas, here is a classic:
Play a well known solea falseta once through as you learned it and then repeat the same falseta, but change the ending. Pretend the first ending is a call and then make up your own ending as a response. Many solea falsetas follow that strategy to make them interesting. You don't have to make up falsetas of your own but you can work over falsetas and give them your own twist to the way they begin or end. At first your work may not be great, but over time if you think that way you can come up with good falsetas. And again show these ideas to your teachers and ask for feed back and help.
Flamenco is like any other music, there is formal structure, but there is always room to play with those structures. The people who get good at flamenco study the masters of the toque, but there is no jail or hell you go to if you start experimenting right away.
In Christopher Parkening's Classical guitar method there is short piece which is an arrangement of a Japanese folk melody called Sakura. It so happens to be in E Phrygian in this version. With a little nudging here, a little tweaking there, it can be creatively altered to fit into Solea compas. It can serve as a primary source idea to make a falseta.
That is one example of taking music from one genre and adapting it to another. Historically many flamenco guitarists have taken melodies from other sources and spun them into falsetas. Sometimes it works sand sometimes it does not, but there is no such thing as The Falseta Police when is comes to where you draw your inspiration.
Michel Foucault said "Biography is form of record keeping. Let the Police keep records."
Jean Genet said "An artist goes at society at an oblique angle, like a criminal the artist is set apart."
Cheers, and good luck making up your falsetas,
S.
Most importantly ignore these sarcastic asses.
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