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mark indigo -> RE: Recommend Some Good Non-Tab Books (Nov. 26 2008 13:44:28)
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quote:
I must admit I was wondering why tab is used so much with flamenco music, so feel free to enlighten me.
quote:
"It won't help you to learn to play flamenco though."
Why do you say that?
Most flamenco guitarists who grow up with it etc. play solely by ear, by listening and watching, and don't write anything, don't have any need to read or write any music (I said MOST, not all, Manolo Sanlucar, Rafael Riqueni and Cañizares being notable exceptions, but they learned to read long after they learned to play...).
Athough structure is provided by the palos or flamenco forms, and by compas and various conventions, there is also a lot of freedom and improvisation, and notating can have an effect of "fixing" things a bit too much (i have had lessons where the teacher not only didn't write anything down, he wouldn't even hardly show specific things, but would play stuff and tell me to go for my own interpretation rather than note for note details).
Flamenco, when transcribed at all, is usually transcribed into either tab (with or without "best of both worlds" time value stems and beams) or tab/dot notation combined in double staves. Tab is used, if at all, as a memory aid, with an assumption that you either were shown how to play it by another guitarist already, or have a video or audio source as reference.
Compared to the amount of flamenco music that exists in audio and visual form, there is very little transcribed, paper is just not the currency (or gp, pdf, whatever), and ultimately you are going to have to use your ears and to some extent your eyes, so why bother developing sight reading? why not spend the time developing ear? if your ultimate goal is to play flamenco then it's probably better to spend an hour learning one falseta by ear that you can play by heart than spending an hour sightreading ten pieces composed of ten falsetas each (ie. a hundred falsetas) that you can't remember and/or play afterwards.
There is seldom any need for anyone to read music for any other instrument as, at least historically, and until very recently, the guitar is/has been the only instrument involved. Tablature was one of the first forms of music notation developed by lute players, and the need for "standard" notation came about writing for groups, orchestras etc. where players of different instruments all play off the same score, so in a sense there's no need for standard notation/dots....
The really big advantage of tab is that as you can play the top E in 5 places on a spanish guitar (more i guess on electric) tab will tell you which one, whereas dots can be ambiguous. Tab will give you the fingering, hand positions etc. very clearly. A lot of flamenco guitar music is based around fingerboard positions and chord shapes etc. and chords which mix notes fretted up the fingerboard with open strings are much simpler to read in tab than in dots (in my opinion/experience).
The main gripe that dot readers seem to have about tab is that it doesn't convey the time values of the notes indicated in the tab, but this problem can be solved by adding stems and beams from standard notation (which is why i called it "best of both worlds") onto the fret numbers. Alain Faucher uses this method for his individual transcriptions (website here: http://www.affedis.com/) though in his books he uses the double line standard notation/tab layout. The other gripe is that even with time values added, tab cannot convey the musical information of standard notation. In classical music, as i understand it, the composers score is the ultimate source, but in flamenco the reference is going to be the actual sound, either live, or recorded, so the necessary musical information is contained in that, not in any transcription of it. In classical music the score is primary and any recording is secondary, an interpretation of that score. In flamenco the live performance, or recording of it is primary, and any transcription is going to be secondary (and probably riddled with errors, lol!)
The only non-tab flamenco notation i've come across is either weird japanese transcriptions of more or less correct dots but clueless fingering, or "flamenco for classical guitarists" atrocities - simplifications of older style flamenco guitar styles with no idea how to notate or transcribe rasgeo, and usually played by people with no idea how to execute them....
There are several ways to quote. One is to highlight and copy text, and click reply. If you already clicked reply, you can go back to the original, copy relevant text, come back to the reply box/window, press the quote button, and paste your text in between the two bracket things. I'm really not a techie so this is probably a crap way to do it.
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