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set chords for styles
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pink
Posts: 570
Joined: Jan. 8 2013
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 RE: set chords for styles (in reply to SLJ)
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Hi Steve ,
I guess its the listening bit that can't be replaced, even by trying to cram as much info into our heads by reading what you can and when you can!
When you are new to this it can be so overwhelming
that all you find yourself doing is asking ,asking, asking until you end up even more confused and sometimes set back because of your thirst for the knowledge.
I've been trying to get my head round this for a year or so now and the year I've had has really
rammed it up me to a level I didn't /couldn't expect.
Now ive been playing guitar for over 30 years at a reasonable level. It has supplemented my income and been a joy and hindrance in unison for as long as I can remember. Then came flamenco! My world , musically, turned into the obsession from the depths of Saturn's substantially hot ,hell bound bottom. The way this musical obsession has grabbed my whole being is something I can't remember experiencing previously , no matter what style I was attempting to slaughter, and its this obsession which leaves you blundering the early months of your playing by racking up and asking question after question...usually until you've forgotten why you asked what you asked in the first place.
What I am trying to say in my long winded ,worldly wise ,middle aged , British bloke with few friends way is that you need to listen to as much a you can as often as you can. It really does help all those burning questions to fall into place and can help to open the mind through familiarity.... once that old head space is open then it will all start to fall into place in a way you ,at this stage couldn't have imagined.
There are some great must buy list posts on the foro..have a look at those and start buying.!
Best to you Steve
Enjoy
pink
P.S. If I am wrong with the above advice ,no disrespect is meant to anyone else's knowledge and understanding of the subject or how it should be presented and or shared... its subjective and purely what I have found to be the case for me .
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Date Jul. 24 2013 21:58:02
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Erik van Goch
Posts: 1787
Joined: Jul. 17 2012
From: Netherlands
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RE: set chords for styles (in reply to Ricardo)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Ricardo
Stop reading and start listening.
I listened to flamenco for 10 years before i bothered to read about it and/or ask questions. Dude to my good ear for melody and harmony i was able to ear play many many songs but i knew nothing about them... i didn't know there names (solares? bulerias? never heart of it), i had no clue there was a compas (not even that there were often 12 beats) and i played picado with 1 finger (and that was 1 of my better techniques). Also i didn't know how to name the notes, how to name a chord or how to picture myself a 3/4, 4/4 or 12/4 beat.
Fortunately when Paco Peña first started his flamenco school at Rotterdam Conservatory in 1985 the selection criteria were still pretty low so my good ears and assumed growing potential made them decide i made a chance to pas the final exam after 5 years of proper schooling (final exam includes a prepared solo concert/ensemble performance and an unprepared performance with singing and dancing). The 11 students that were selected also had to be able/willing to learn how to play the guitar again from scratch (to many bad habits). In my case i also had to learn the music and everything that comes with it from scratch again (how to recognize the styles, how to name them, how to play them with correct interpretation and compas). Only after they showed me the many blind spots in my listening/playing habits i started noticing things i never noticed before, things you and i take for granted now but once were not, at least not to me.
Still even in those years (80ties) studying records of the 80ties, 70ties and older (cd,s were a novelty, dvd and internet didn't exist yet) Tarantas for me was primary linked to F# phrygian, Mineras to G# phrygian, Rondeña to C# phryfian, Soleares to E-phrygian (or A-phrygian), Bulerias to A-phrygian (with some variations in A or Am or in similar e keys), Seguiriyas, Tientos and Tangos to A phrygian and so on. You probably call that a blind spot as well (like my assumed solo fixation) because obviously every generation/location and creative individual treasured there own variations. But not so long ago (and probably even at precent day) non professional players in Spain were likely to play only a limited amount of palos (the local ones and some others) in the local keys. They can play those pieces way better then i can play them but i might beat them in a couple of others palos they never play. As far as the professionals are concerned, at precent day you don't seem to count if you don't modulate at least 4 times in a piece and/or play 10 different tunings :-)
I totally agree listening is the key factor (preferably to both solo, cante, baile and a knowledgeable teacher) but my story demonstrates that you might miss a lot when you don't bother to read/ask a bit as well.... the average audio track does not inform you that you are going to hear a bulerias or how to count/feel it.
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Date Jul. 24 2013 22:29:13
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Mark2
Posts: 1872
Joined: Jul. 12 2004
From: San Francisco
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RE: set chords for styles (in reply to SLJ)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SLJ
Im still figuring out what a solea,, bulerias, alegrias, actually are. But I saw online somewhere that a solea was always in Am,,, and that the other styles /palos?
were always in a certain key as well, is this correct??
thanks Steve
They are distinguished by their compas and the cante, not the key. Some forms can be played in any key, but there are some keys that the various forms were traditionally played in, but that has changed as more keys are now being used for various forms. A few forms remain welded to their traditional key(tarrantos, minera), but the one's you mentioned are not.
solea-mostly E and A, but there's other possibilities.
Alegrias-mostly E and A, but also C, D, G, and whatever else someone decides to do it in.
bulerias-mostly E, A, B, C#, but anything goes.
These forms each have a distinct compas, which hopefully one day soon you'll be able to identify by nothing more than someone clapping. Take lessons from the best flamenco you can. Listening is critical, but will likely not be enough to understand or even identify the forms for quite some time.
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Date Jul. 24 2013 22:46:55
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Erik van Goch
Posts: 1787
Joined: Jul. 17 2012
From: Netherlands
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RE: set chords for styles (in reply to Ricardo)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Ricardo
Re learning as Erik says is a problem only if you try to play it by ear and get it wrong with no maestros, but in this day and age a simple afternoon on youtube seeing how it is done live could fix a lot of those early freshman mis conceptions caused by casual listening.
Ricardo
There are many different ways we can see/hear things and i believe we first of all hear/see what we have learned to hear/see and/or expect to hear/see. My father always compares it with that famous drawing in which some see "a beautiful young lady" and other "an old witch with a wart". Both pictures are there and still it is impossible to see both interpretations simultaneously. If you see 1 picture you can overlook the other one the rest of your life, until someone reveals you the other way to look at it. In flamenco there are many beautiful girl/old witch situations and in most cases people tend to see the wrong picture. Misconceptions not only occur when working with audio but also when consulting video or (even better) learning it directly from the maestro in person (for instance during a masterclass) simply because he can not look into your head and/or afford to spend 2 weeks on one single falseta because not everybody is playing it correctly yet. On top, while you play your old witch he might hear a beautiful lady (with perhaps an occasional hiccup). Things can even go wrong when you take weekly lessons.
For example:
A dance teacher i knew used to give this pulse during the very first lesson:
X-X-X-
next an other pattern was exercised without any explanation or demanded accent:
XX,X-X-
Soon the students interpret it as "short short, long, long" with an accent on the first long beat. So they felt "to the Beat beat" with 3 notes on the beat and 1 in between. But in reality it had to be the other way around with 1 note on the beat and 3 contras...."and, 1and,- and,-" a classical young girl/old tart case.
I was not allowed to clap (that would only confuse them according to the teacher). I objected but the teacher insisted. After a couple of weeks clapping was added. Soon they liked it. You see said the teacher, it works better this way. Better my ass, all students still thought they were dancing on the beat and that i was adding counter beats so they still were not alarmed. The real fun began when it finally was preceded by an other compas. Suddenly their 1 (which didn't feel like a 1 to begin with) turned out to be 12,5 with devastating results. After a couple of weeks some of them did catch up with the intended interpretation, others didn't. As a result the rest of the year half the group entered at 12,5 and the other half at 1, playing the same theme with shifted beats simultaneously .... that's what i call confusing.
Obviously i was frequently trapped by the young girl/old tart problem myself, not only in my beginners years but basically up to this day. In my 4th year with Paco it took me 30 minutes to master a Rondeña falseta by Tomatito (using video so what could go wrong?). It was a very simple, repetitive melody fallowing a fandongos pulse >--,>--,>--,>--. When i showed it to Paco he approved the notes, the relation to the individual beats and even the underlaying ">--" pulse, but not the place i choose to drop the > part. As it turned out the bloody thing started on a different place in the compas then i thought and as a result i played it with parallel shifted accents/feet taps (which also explained the "compas mistake" tomatito seemed to make at the end of the falseta). Needles to say correcting the accents highly inflicted with my inner feeling and re-learning it took me not 30 minutes but 4 days of hard work. Don't think this will only happen to dummies, it can happen to everybody who is not born and raised in flamenco traditions.
Fandangos is still one of my angstgegners when it comes to melody/compas relation. Even the profs go wrong every now and then when they play and explain an isolated fandangos falseta, not in the beat/melody relation but when dropping the first note. On his lesson dvd Riqueni mistakenly starts a fandangos falseta on the wrong beat as well. In a normal situation he would never make a mistake like that but playing it separately and without previous compas he simply overlooks he has to start that specific type of falseta 3 beats earlier than usual (actually a pretty comon mistake in situations like that). He smells trouble at the tail of the falseta and automatically adapts an alternative ending, keeping the compas but destroying the falseta in the process. Wonder how many people noticed it (and cursed him for not taking the trouble to look at it again, in stead of including both mistakes in the dvd). Without an introducing compas 2 people can play the same thing simultaneously wile feeling totally different relations to the compas (noticed or un noticed).... 1 can be wrong, or both, ore non, depending on the situation.
PS
This is the Rondeña theme i misinterpret. I give the notes and the individual beats (/) but no info about on which beat it begins.......
Tuning: Rondeña (dadf#be) x means continuation last note.. it mixes triplets (3 notes a beat) with 1/8 notes (2 notes a beat).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------4-/6~4--6-/7-x-x-------2-/4~2--4-/6-x-x--------0/2~0-2-/4-x-/x~2-/0-----/0-x----
-----4---------------------------2---------------------------0------------------------------4----------
--4---------------------------/2--------------------------/0--------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4----4---4----
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2----2---2----
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2----2---2----
-----2-/4~2--4-/6-x-x--------0/2~0-2-/4~2~0--------0--------0-----------0----0---0----
---2---------------------------0-----------------------/3~4---/3~4---/3-x-----4-----4---4----
/2--------------------------/0-------------------------------------------------/-x-3-/-x-3--/3----
I leave it to the individual viewer to feel challenged to guess on with beat the first plugged note is supposed to drop..... beat 1, 2 or 3 of the ">--" pulse. I suspect Ricardo is experienced enough to know the answer but i bed i'm not the only one who failed to give the correct answer.
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Date Jul. 25 2013 17:32:50
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Ricardo
Posts: 14819
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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RE: set chords for styles (in reply to Erik van Goch)
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quote:
Needles to say correcting the accents highly inflicted with my inner feeling and re-learning it took me not 30 minutes but 4 days of hard work. Don't think this will only happen to dummies, it can happen to everybody who is not born and raised in flamenco traditions.
Look, I am totally with you on this man. I say this issue is not unique to flamenco, but music with interesting rhythm in general. THe same phenomena occurs in Rock, Jazz, even pop. I remind of the Van Halen example years ago I gave asking people to guess how many thumbs before the down beat, because it was weird feel, and meant to be tricky IMO. THese are very interesting details inside the rhythm itself. But my point was despite the challenge of relearning the structure after hearing it wrong, it doesn't change the fact you KNEW it was Rondeña and not alegria or siguiriya, etc. I am speaking of the more superficial sign posts that define a palo, or distinguish one from the other.
I dont' think anyone be "stupid" for learning a musical phrase shifted out of compas or whatever. Nor the fact a live teacher can still not convey the exact feeling of beat that is meant. Rather that seeing a video of say a guitarist tapping his foot can be quite revealing. IN the sense you can watch again and again until you perhaps get that extra 3d info missing from a recording only, or a vague recollection of what a live teacher showed.
About that timing issue, starting wrong beat and having the wrong internal map of a phrase, I learned a trick from drummers in college to "fix" that problem. It was an exercise called "tap timing" where you displace say 3 16th notes in different ways against the beat. (1e&,2e&, 3e&....&ah1,&a2,&ah3.....ah1e,ah2e,ah3e....e&ah,e&ah,e&ah....), then you try just 2 16ths same exercise....I realize you could take a MELODY with the same number of notes and do the same thing, and "Unlock" your preconceived map of the timing.
_____________________________
CD's and transcriptions available here:
www.ricardomarlow.com
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Date Jul. 27 2013 15:38:52
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