srshea -> RE: What pieces or toques are you working on? (Jan. 12 2009 19:46:28)
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Since I found I dance class to work with a couple of months ago, almost all of my practicing and playing has been geared towards preparing for that- just very basic compas, llamadas and such. It’s looking likely that we’re going to be playing at a community arts event in about three months, so now’s there’s going to be a handful of things that I’m going to have to work on and get tight in preparation for that. I don’t feel at all ready for it, but there’s nothing like some external pressure to get you motivated to get some work done. Tientos- the teacher just gave me a recording of a tientos that she has a bit of choreography for. As recorded it’s a bit beyond my reach, but I definitely have some similar, simpler material to swap out, while keeping the whole piece close to what she’s used to working with. I feel pretty good about this one. Sevillanas- I always thought sevillanas was pretty easy, just playing it by rote, straight from tabs, but it’s been a surprisingly difficult struggle to learn to strum a simple, danceable sevillanas that actually ends when the dancers expect it to! Keeping the proper compas with the accents and the chord changes in the right spots has been tricky, but I finally made sense of it earlier this week. Now I need really solidify that understanding, and be able to play it properly, consistently. Bulerias- After a lot of shaky, on/off work on bulerias since last spring, I’ve finally got some basic compas stuff down. It’s still slow and rough around the edges, but I feel like I do have my foot in the door, know my away around the compas without just playing the same thing exactly the same each time, and know what I need to keep working on. I finally felt comfortable and confident enough to take a stab at learning a first falseta a week or two ago, and that was pretty satisfying and felt like a breakthrough moment. Alegrias- basic stuff, simple falsetas. Farruca- This is the one I feel most confident in, and I have enough different strumming patterns and falsetas to keep things interesting. Solea por Bulerias- The teacher wants to do one of these, but I have zero experience playing it, wouldn’t even know where to start. I was upfront about it and told her that that’s the one thing I just might not be able to pull off, and she seemed fine with that. But I do want to at least try to figure out some basic compas and try to put something together. Neil Young and Crazy Horse- Big, big fan, and Zuma is one of my favorites, but for whatever reason, I’ve never really taken to Cortez. I even think it’s a great song, but I just don’t get a lot of enjoyment from it, personally. Barstool Blues, on the other hand, is a straight-up mammajamma! Oh, and a Fandangos de Huelva, too, which is pretty fun to play, though I need to come up with something a bit more interesting than the same, boring chords I keep strumming over and over....
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