Erik van Goch -> RE: Thumb 'Apoyando'? (Jun. 15 2013 15:08:26)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Miguel de Maria Erik, I was told that Paco required the students to play ONLY p for quite some time and only let them play other things once they had that down. There is a wonderful classical player named Philip Hii--just happened to be listening to his Chopin transcriptions just now--and he also talks a lot about getting power through relaxation. He also strongly advocates playing something for hours and hours, and that technical breakthroughs usually only happen after 3 hours of uninterrupted work on them! I was part of the first group of students that entered Paco's University school of Flamenco guitar. At the time Paco was convinced that once you were able to use the thump "the correct way" the rest would be easy. So for weeks/mounts his lessons were restricted to playing "open strings" with pulgar, focussing on the right use and relaxation of the thump/hand/wrist/arm unit, quite often with Paco ending up holding/pushing/operating your hand, like you were a marionette :-). Paco was precent only once a mount..... the weekly "in between lessons" were given by Ricardo Mendeville and my father Hans van Goch, an outstanding didactic who had his own idea's about ideal development and soon challenged the "thump only" policy. He introduced a parallel project focussing on improving the extremely bad left hand habits of the average student, drilling all kinds of grips, scales, bindings and the matching right hand techniques (mainly i-m string-walking and arpeggios). And he was spot on because acquiring the (intended) thump control turned out to take mounts or even years and so did mastering the other techniques. But as far as the flamenco techniques are concerned the first focus is indeed getting a proper and relaxed pulgar (single notes, various string combinations, stroked chords)..... gradually in between index upstrokes are integrated later fallowed by other techniques like rasgueado, arpeggio, tremolo, alzapua, picado. Personally i hardly ever studied more then 1 hour on a row and hardly ever with only 1 theme on the program. But i did study full focus (which is way more difficult then you think) and after 1 hour of power-study like that i really needed 8 hours of sleep to restore/benefit from it. I had excellent and constructive results with executing a couple of "full focus 1 hour sessions" a day, but i must admit that twice i had a much more instant breakthrough that were indeed the result of repeating a small thing for hours and hours on a row, so it's worth a try (as long as you don't hurt your hands in the process). I believe the most important ingredients are focus, ambition and total devotion, loving getting results more then life itself. My holly grail is "the smaller the subject of your focus, the bigger the result" and i guess this probably works with both "small portioned daily exercises" as well with "marathon sessions"... wonder what happens if i combine the two :-).
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