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For those of you who use this technique. Do you use the same pattern all the time (i.e. imaimaima or amiamiamiami regardless of what your left hand is doing and what strings you are on) or do you vary it?
depends, but most often it is ami ami ami, yet you might have to start with i or m in order to get into the thing. And also it is typical to do this free stroke like tremolo/arp even though you might be doing a scale run.
Well I can play i m relatively well I think (160+ for scales and stuff over 6 strings, 200+ for easy runs) so that is not a problem. I just suffer from the left/right hand link or whatever you would call it. (i.e. w/ ami I want to play ascending scales ima and descending ami...)
Gaash, A friend of mine, Matt Palmer, has a book out called "The Virtuoso Guitarist: A new Approach to Fast Scales". It is a method for ami scales-mainly for classical guitarists but it could work for flamenco. www.mattpalmerguitar.com
BTW: Matt is a friend of Grisha and has a lot of respect for Grisha's technique.
Jesus Torres does ami for all of his picado runs(all rest stroke), and does amiamiami regardless of how many notes there are per string in the run. He told me he gets better results with this than with i - m, however he mentioned a disadvantage of this approach is that a will be closer to the bridge relative to i being closer to the sound hole, so it's harder to get an even tone.