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indirac -> new to flamenco (Nov. 2 2003 19:54:06)
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Hi everyone, I'm new to this forum and to flamenco guitar in general. There are no teachers near where I live, so I'm unfortunately having to try to figure things out on my own for the time being. I am coming from playing classical guitar (which I take fairly seriously) as well as some jazz & other ensemble type playing (which is more of a casual interest), so I'm hoping that will ease the learning curve for flamenco a bit.
Since everything I've heard indicates that one really needs a teacher (or to play with dancers/singers) to get the right kind of feeling involved, I've been trying to work mostly on technique (so when I find a teacher I can focus more on feeling/style/etc, the more ephemeral aspects). So, to this end I've been working on picado (with scales), rasgueado (my continuous triplet rasgueado sounds good to me; working on getting the quintuplet c-a-m-i-p in time and up to speed), and golpe*. With respect to the latter, I have found very few exercises on the web. In particular, they all seem to indicate that a golpe tap is usually done when doing a downward strum with the i finger. Can it also be done on a thumbstroke? The reason I ask is this (bear with me, this would take about 10 seconds to show in person but is kind of longwinded to explain here):
I've read that the strong beats in a solearas are 3,6,8,10,12. I also noticed that a simple falseta I picked up one has downward index finger strums on beats 3,6, and 8, which of course facilitates tapping on those strong beats. Now, beat 10 is where the standard E major arpeggio comes at the end of the falseta, right? So if you wanted to tap there, you'd either have to play the arpeggio unconventionally or tap while playing a thumbstroke (which feels unwieldy, especially since I typically play with the a finger right after the thumbstroke). I've found it's easy to change the timing of the arpeggio so that beat 12 falls on a downstroke of the i finger, but haven't found a convenient alteration so that beat 10 does. I'm guessing the answer to this is that the strong beats simply don't always need to be accompanied by golpe? Or there's something more fundamental that I don't understand, perhaps.
~Jeremy
*I'm hoping to buy a student flamenco guitar in the next few months; until then I'm using my cedar top classical, with a post-it note as makeshift golpeador.
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