Brendan -> RE: Top Tips (Sep. 18 2015 13:49:44)
|
Right so. I took Payaso's list, tinkered with it, tried it on some friends and tweaked it some more. It remains, of course, superficial and derivative--it is a listicle to appear in a newsletter. Anything deep or original would violate the norms of the genre. Payaso: to be fair to our detractors, the accusation of superficiality and the anxiety about attribution came from different quarters, so no individual is guilty of contradiction. Tips for beginning flamenco guitarists There are no original ideas on this list. These are all suggestions that you will hear eventually if you play flamenco guitar for long enough. Thanks for help in compiling this list go to the participants in the Foro Flamenco (www.foroflamenco.com) and the London School of Flamenco Guitar Seville 2015 field trip. Special thanks to Foro member Payaso, who provided a list of tips on which this is based. 1. Soak yourself in flamenco singing. Cante is the roots and trunk of flamenco. Flamenco guitar originated as accompaniment to Cante and takes its style and structure from song. This, rather than any of the distinctive techniques, is what makes flamenco guitar flamenco. It's possible to play flamenco on the piano or the saxophone, provided you stick to the forms and rules established in Cante. Guitar-playing that ignores those rules is not flamenco, no matter how much rasgueado and alzapua it has. So learn to appreciate flamenco Cante for its own sake. Listen to lots of it, old and new. 2. Use what you know about other styles of music. Your wider musical knowledge will help you to understand what makes flamenco distinctive. Besides, flamenco may have grown in the soil of Andalusia, but its heartland has a sea-coast with major ports such as Cadiz and Malaga. Flamenco has always been open to other influences, including Spanish folk music such as Sevillanas, styles from the Americas (notably the palos de ida y vuelta), and now flamenco artists collaborate freely with every possible genre of music. Flamenco is different to other kinds of music, but it isn't completely alien. Besides, if you want to play the purest flamenco, you will need a wider view to decide what ‘pure’ means. 3. Learn some music theory. A basic understanding of chord construction and function will help you to learn new material faster and remember it for longer. Patterns familiar from other genres, such as secondary dominants and the circle of fourths, are present in flamenco and it is useful to recognise them. 4. Don't get hung up on theory. This is not jazz. Flamenco guitarists traditionally learned by copying, and did not elaborate general notions about harmony or composition. Some flamencos still speak proudly of having never had a formal lesson, of having learned their craft from family elders or from the street. 5. Don't try to learn from exclusively from books and the Internet. Like all traditional music, flamenco has subtleties of rhythm and tone that cannot be written down. Its techniques require precise hand positions that books cannot convey. You need someone to correct your bad habits. Go to a teacher. 6. Read books. There are some excellent tutorial books, collections of falsetas, scores of long pieces and written discussions of flamenco style and harmony. Besides, making your own transcriptions can be very instructive. Traditional flamencos did not learn from books, but those of us who were not born into a flamenco family need the extra help that books provide. 7. Practice in front of a mirror. Check that your positions and motions are correct. Look for superfluous movement and signs of tension. Striking or plucking a string requires a brief moment of muscle-tension. It is essential that the muscle you just used relaxes fully afterwards. Video yourself playing so that you can analyse at leisure. 8. Practice with your eyes shut. Rely on your senses of touch, position and movement to know where your hands are relative to the guitar. When you play with others, you will need to look away from your hands to know what is going on and what is about to happen. So teach your hands to find their way without your eyes helping. 9. Play for dancers. Outside Spain, dance classes are the most common form of flamenco activity. Sitting in with an experienced guitarist is essential at first, but there is no substitute for accompanying a dance class on your own. You will quickly learn to anticipate what the dancers will do and you will learn to communicate with dancers, who have their own idiom and don't normally speak guitarist. 10. Don't play for dancers without proper amplification. Three dancers in dance shoes on a dance floor will easily drown your guitar, and if you strain to play louder, you may injure yourself. The flamenco writer and guitarist Donn Pohren permanently damaged his hand this way. Since his day, small, lightweight and cheap amplifiers have become available. Buy one. 11. Do all your daily drills to a metronome. This builds accuracy and discourages cheating. Don't neglect your left hand, and make a special effort to develop its third and fourth fingers. 12. If you're at a stage where any of these tips are useful, you're playing your guitar for fun. Don't allow tips 1-11 to interfere with that.
|
|
|
|