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My lessons so far are based on building up a collection of falsetas, each focusing on a different basic flamenco technique.
I'm aware of these things called 'marcaje' which are played in between falsetas. I'm wondering, when I get 6 or 7 falsetas to an acceptable level, what is the next step in stringing them together to form a relatively "correct" Solea piece of solo guitar? I'd like to use my creativity and reasonable grasp of music theory to build a little 1-2 minute tune using my falsetas, but I need something to fill in between. When I just play them all one after the other, back to back, it sounds like it all "fits" together musically, but it just sounds too busy and frantic.
Any tips on where start? I only do a lesson every week or so due to my school schedule, so I am learning a lot on my own time as well. I use my lessons more for making sure I'm using the right technique.
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to wiking)
I would go with learning solea palo structure and how it applies to guitar playing meanwhile throwing in the techniques you are already comfortable with here and there rather than gathering falsetas..
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to wiking)
This is a solea song:
Solo guitar flamenco pieces don't have stead fast rules. If you insist to pursue the solo guitar route (which I did at first and strongly recommend against for many reasons) your best bet is to learn many solo pieces all the way through, study the crap out of them and they're song dynamics, then piece together something. This though will take you many years to do well.
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to wiking)
Personally i make a distinction between falsetas (the actual melodies) and what i use to call "compas variations", the standard variations you play in between the falsetas (i have no idea how others call them but that's how my teacher called them and how i communicate them with my students). In bulerias the compas variations are the A and bB/A chord variations you play in between your falsetas. In soleares (and all other styles) you have similar standard lines like
as well as the well known RASGUEADO variations on E or on the F>C>F>E sequence and other "in between" variations.
These kind of variations can cover 1 or more compasses and generally end on 12 or on 10 (inviting the falseta like you invite a singer).
2 or more falsetas can be glued together head to tail (if they make a nice combination) or can be separated by adding in between compas variations like above. Good compas variations tastefully fit/adapt to both the previous and the next falseta and in modern day compositions quite often blend in with the falsetas. Your task will be to find a nice combination of falsetas/compas variations and the more material you have to choose from (or the better you are in molding the notes to your likings) the more tasteful you can shape your piece. In the beginning you have to make the best of what you have, over the years (learning more and more material) you can be more picky about what (not) to include.
You can find plenty of tasteful examples when you study the maestros.
I listed a couple of variations (from simple to more complex) on one of above themes in this post (not the tremolo post on the bottom but the extremely long post you see if you scroll up).
Posts: 3467
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to wiking)
quote:
I'm wondering, when I get 6 or 7 falsetas to an acceptable level, what is the next step in stringing them together to form a relatively "correct" Solea piece of solo guitar?
I would advise you to listen to some of the Soleas performed by Sabicas, for example. and learn to connect falsetas by inserting a nice rasgueado or tremolo at appropriate junctures. Of course, this entails learning rasgeados appropriate to the Solea, and in particular learning the tremolo, which requires a lot of work to nail down with dead-on steady strokes. Once attained, however, you will find the the result well worth the effort.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to wiking)
Hi, Wiking –
First, let me wish you good luck in pursuing a rewarding non-career in solo flamenco guitar. (You won’t be able to make it a career, because there is no longer such a thing as a solo flamenco guitar recital. The days when a player could hold an audience spellbound armed with nothing but a three-pound flamenco guitar are long gone, ever since Paco de Lucía changed the music to incorporate a jazzier aesthetic, and changed the performance paradigm to match the jazz ensemble’s quart, quint, sex or septet concept.)
You’ll get a lot of flak from people who say it’s wrong to focus on the solo flamenco guitar. They have a sort of point, assuming you’re a genius. It’s great to accompany a good flamenco singer, since a singer gets closer to the beating heart of flamenco than any guitarist can. (All Paco really wanted to do was sing flamenco, but he was not competent in that area.)
The tricky part of accompanying a good singer is this: You must know flamenco song very, very well. There may be as many as a dozen non-Spanish guitarists who meet that criterion, but you will not join that elite.
It’s okay to accompany a good dancer, too, unless he or she demands that you learn specific routines for each dance, because that’s too much memorization – rotes and routines can be inappropriate in actual flamenco. Also, it takes a couple of decades.
So play the solo flamenco guitar. I think it’s the best kind of guitar music there is, because it uses the full range of the instrument’s possibilities, including percussion. I suspect it may also be the most difficult style of guitar as well, for that same reason. (I’ve been told that by excellent jazz, rock, blues and classical players over the years.) To get really good will almost kill you. Also, you won’t find many people who like, or are even willing to listen to, the finished product. The average human tolerance level for flamenco guitar is eight to twelve minutes. (For serious flamenco song, it’s about ninety seconds.)
But look on the bright side: You won’t have to put up with herding a whole flamenco ensemble or helping them through personal difficulties. (What do you call a drummer whose girlfriend has left him? Homeless.) You won’t have to drive a crowded VW camper or Dodge Caravan through the backwoods of Minnesota in a snowstorm, looking for a high school auditorium where thirteen people await your appearance. You won’t have to learn the wholly separate arts of musical arrangement, or sound and lighting, or publicity and financial management or defense against lawsuits by former ensemble members.
One more thing. Do not try to improvise until you have started to understand flamenco and the guitar, a few years from now. Otherwise, your improvisations will not be real flamenco or real improvisation. Yes, it will be “your music”, for whatever that’s worth. But it won’t be flamenco.
More likely, you will never be able to improvise actual flamenco. Paco de Lucía said that while he was the best flamenco player in the world for many years, neither he nor any other flamenco guitarist was able to really improvise – in the glorious, jazzistic, Charlie Parkerian sense of the word.
Flamenco players thought they were improvising, Paco said, but they were just reshuffling and inverting the stuff they had stolen or laboriously worked out. (I believe Niño Ricardo, Paco’s original inspiration, might have been able to truly improvise flamenco.) It wasn’t until Al and John and Chick dragooned the shy and reluctant (and often nauseous) Paco and stuck him into the onstage hot seat nightly for many months that he finally got the hang of it. He was no longer just a flamenco guitarist. He had become a real musician. He was very proud of that achievement.
Learn the best stuff from the best guitarists. The level of technique is so high today that playing late Paco or Post-Paco stuff will be a distant dream for a long time, and probably forever. But there are a lot of great pre-Paco players whose music is still very flamenco and fascinating and beautiful and powerful. You can be mimicking a few of them badly in just a few intense months, and less badly in a year or two. Early Paco, up to the eighties, can be imitated effectively by non-gifted but diligent humans after a few decades or so (trust me – we all thought he was from another dimension when he popped up in 1967, but ten years later we'd gotten the hang of his first four LP’s. – minus the command, creativity, genius, aplomb, expression and a few other cheesy tricks, of course.)
Woody Allen mentioned a concert violinist whose career was shattered when she realized she would have to practice the violin. Practice, practice. If people within earshot are not mad at you, you are not practicing enough. If they are yelling at you to stop, you are making progress. When they come running at you with sharp pencils or cutlery and screaming, you can ease up for a while.
I was driving around Cambridge once, lost as usual. I called out to an elderly pedestrian, “Excuse me, how do I get to Harvard?”
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to solea1)
Best post ever !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sincere to facetious on a hair, love it.
D.
quote:
ORIGINAL: solea1
Hi, Wiking –
First, let me wish you good luck in pursuing a rewarding non-career in solo flamenco guitar. (You won’t be able to make it a career, because there is no longer such a thing as a solo flamenco guitar recital. The days when a player could hold an audience spellbound armed with nothing but a three-pound flamenco guitar are long gone, ever since Paco de Lucía changed the music to incorporate a jazzier aesthetic, and changed the performance paradigm to match the jazz ensemble’s quart, quint, sex or septet concept.)
You’ll get a lot of flak from people who say it’s wrong to focus on the solo flamenco guitar. They have a sort of point, assuming you’re a genius. It’s great to accompany a good flamenco singer, since a singer gets closer to the beating heart of flamenco than any guitarist can. (All Paco really wanted to do was sing flamenco, but he was not competent in that area.)
The tricky part of accompanying a good singer is this: You must know flamenco song very, very well. There may be as many as a dozen non-Spanish guitarists who meet that criterion, but you will not join that elite.
It’s okay to accompany a good dancer, too, unless he or she demands that you learn specific routines for each dance, because that’s too much memorization – rotes and routines can be inappropriate in actual flamenco. Also, it takes a couple of decades.
So play the solo flamenco guitar. I think it’s the best kind of guitar music there is, because it uses the full range of the instrument’s possibilities, including percussion. I suspect it may also be the most difficult style of guitar as well, for that same reason. (I’ve been told that by excellent jazz, rock, blues and classical players over the years.) To get really good will almost kill you. Also, you won’t find many people who like, or are even willing to listen to, the finished product. The average human tolerance level for flamenco guitar is eight to twelve minutes. (For serious flamenco song, it’s about ninety seconds.)
But look on the bright side: You won’t have to put up with herding a whole flamenco ensemble or helping them through personal difficulties. (What do you call a drummer whose girlfriend has left him? Homeless.) You won’t have to drive a crowded VW camper or Dodge Caravan through the backwoods of Minnesota in a snowstorm, looking for a high school auditorium where thirteen people await your appearance. You won’t have to learn the wholly separate arts of musical arrangement, or sound and lighting, or publicity and financial management or defense against lawsuits by former ensemble members.
One more thing. Do not try to improvise until you have started to understand flamenco and the guitar, a few years from now. Otherwise, your improvisations will not be real flamenco or real improvisation. Yes, it will be “your music”, for whatever that’s worth. But it won’t be flamenco.
More likely, you will never be able to improvise actual flamenco. Paco de Lucía said that while he was the best flamenco player in the world for many years, neither he nor any other flamenco guitarist was able to really improvise – in the glorious, jazzistic, Charlie Parkerian sense of the word.
Flamenco players thought they were improvising, Paco said, but they were just reshuffling and inverting the stuff they had stolen or laboriously worked out. (I believe Niño Ricardo, Paco’s original inspiration, might have been able to truly improvise flamenco.) It wasn’t until Al and John and Chick dragooned the shy and reluctant (and often nauseous) Paco and stuck him into the onstage hot seat nightly for many months that he finally got the hang of it. He was no longer just a flamenco guitarist. He had become a real musician. He was very proud of that achievement.
Learn the best stuff from the best guitarists. The level of technique is so high today that playing late Paco or Post-Paco stuff will be a distant dream for a long time, and probably forever. But there are a lot of great pre-Paco players whose music is still very flamenco and fascinating and beautiful and powerful. You can be mimicking a few of them badly in just a few intense months, and less badly in a year or two. Early Paco, up to the eighties, can be imitated effectively by non-gifted but diligent humans after a few decades or so (trust me – we all thought he was from another dimension when he popped up in 1967, but ten years later we'd gotten the hang of his first four LP’s. – minus the command, creativity, genius, aplomb, expression and a few other cheesy tricks, of course.)
Woody Allen mentioned a concert violinist whose career was shattered when she realized she would have to practice the violin. Practice, practice. If people within earshot are not mad at you, you are not practicing enough. If they are yelling at you to stop, you are making progress. When they come running at you with sharp pencils or cutlery and screaming, you can ease up for a while.
I was driving around Cambridge once, lost as usual. I called out to an elderly pedestrian, “Excuse me, how do I get to Harvard?”
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to wiking)
quote:
It’s great to accompany a good flamenco singer
I even enjoy accompanying the bad ones! lolol It's just fun to jam........ bad dancers are a little tougher to enjoy.......
I'm not a good accompanist but I feel like my focusing on accompanying has made me a better soloist, I can transition through things better and my attempts at composition feel more coherent to me. Like "Yeah, that SHOULD go there."
Posts: 3467
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to solea1)
quote:
The days when a player could hold an audience spellbound armed with nothing but a three-pound flamenco guitar are long gone
More's the pity. Some of us still think nothing surpasses listening to Sabicas performing solo. But you are correct in that he could not do so today and even fill half an auditorium.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to solea1)
quote:
ORIGINAL: solea1
The days when a player could hold an audience spellbound armed with nothing but a three-pound flamenco guitar are long gone, ever since Paco de Lucía changed the music to incorporate a jazzier aesthetic, and changed the performance paradigm to match the jazz ensemble’s quart, quint, sex or septet concept.)
First they made some brave attempts to make the solo guitar more attractive using visual additives of various kind (from a well placed glass* up to modern art) but although the glass generated a promising ole (1:28) it soon became evident the guitar could not survive modern times without accepting the help of other musicians.
* I believe the question if the glass was inspired by Picasso or M.C.Escher was the longest foro discussion ever.
_____________________________
The smaller the object of your focus the bigger the result.
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to wiking)
For you who speaks Spanish her is an interesting interview with Raimundo Amador touching some of the subjects you been discussing,
Amongst other things he talks about people who have had an impact music wise for him and says that Manuel Molina was one. Molina told him you play very good but…you must forget about Paco. First he thought my god what is this guy on about? But after thinking for a while he thought he must have a reason for saying so he took notice and that’s how the style of “Raimundo Amador came about” thanks to Manuel Molina.
Then he goes on and says something solea1 talked about, he says theory is god but then there is the schooling you only get on the street. As young he used to play sitting on the stairs of his house and he could already play all the palos and one day this kid comes by that liked to "venture around"(I am guessing he means in flamenco circles)and he showed him two chords and the kid did better then him even though he could play all the palos. Why? Because I had learned at home with my father he continues and studied the guitar sitting in the stairs but then when a singer or dancer came by I didn’t have a clue what to do and this this kid comes that don’t know nothing about the guitar I show him two chords and with that he could accompany singing and dance. So he went to the “streets” to learn the things he hadn’t/couldn’t learn at home.
I know Raimundo quite well. If you have Rito y Geografía, you can see a very young Raimundo and his brother playing de puta mare. He did not need to learn from Manuel, they come from the same place. You must understand that the Andaluces are born embusteros, especially when they are fed up with dopey interviews
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to athrane77)
quote:
I think nothing of self-appointed "flamenco-authorities" (who are not spanish flamencos) but sadly in this foro are a lot of people like that (Mr. Expert e.g.) We are foreigners and in fact we knowing like nothing about flamenco. Don't forget that.
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to athrane77)
quote:
I think nothing of self-appointed "flamenco-authorities" (who are not spanish flamencos) but sadly in this foro are a lot of people like that (Mr. Expert e.g.) We are foreigners and in fact we knowing like nothing about flamenco. Don't forget that.
1. when I meet guys who were learning Paco's stuff from the seventies as the records came out I like to shut up and listen. In my experience they usually have lots of interest to share.
2. knighthood from the king of Spain for services to flamenco works for me.
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to athrane77)
quote:
ORIGINAL: jof
I think nothing of self-appointed "flamenco-authorities" (who are not spanish flamencos)
I once attended a lecture of a spanish flamenco authority addressing full time students of Paco Peñas (Rotterdam based) school of flamenco guitar visiting Cordoba. The guy was said to have an incredible knowledge of the old cante practice and during the start of that lecture proved to have an excellent voice himself, singing a couple of very nice examples of the old ways/singers.
Unfortunately he choose not to waste his time on looking at the past to long (something we would have loved very much) but to point his arrows on precent day flamenco. So we learned flamenco is part of your roods and only suitable for those born in the correct environment. As it turned out the wright conditions were way more complex then i ever held possible because the river that split Seville in two also separated the flamenco part from the not flamenco part. Gypsies in general were supposed to play a very questionable role in flamenco, Camaron turned out to be the devil in person and Paco de Lucia totally destroyed what was once such a beautiful art form.
We (students and teachers) all hated what he had to say, but the lessons were mandatory to all Rotterdam flamenco students (although i'm pretty sure Paco would have ended that **** if he would have been precent at that moment). The only one excused to leave was me (i already graduated 1 year before) so i took the opportunity to visit the exhibition of erotic art in Greek and Roman terra sigillata pottery located in the same building (which turned out to be an oasis of decency compared to that lecture).
Listening to the stories of a foreigner who traveled spain full time in the 60ties and 70ties and spend lot's of time, energy and money in preserving the flamenco treasures spain itself showed no interest in (and gave spain it's Paco de Lucia stamp) can be so much more rewarding. Although i have no idea if he uses them, Paco Serrano (having a similar flamenco school in Cordoba) owns a very rare copy of the complete (over 1000 pages) flamenco guitar didactic/study collection my father made for personal use (covering the complete field from first lessons up to performance level). He thinks my fathers annotation system is the best ever, not a bad result for a foreigner (it even covers dance melodies that were common in the 50ties but are (partly) forgotten by the precent generation... my father played them back then when he accompanied spanish dancers visiting the netherlands (back than a dancer did not bring his own singer or guitarist on foreign travels but a stag of orchestrated flamenco partitures to be played by local musicians. They actually were pretty good, good enough to translate them back to the underlaying original guitar solo if you were able to do/play that).
_____________________________
The smaller the object of your focus the bigger the result.
Posts: 15242
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- wha... (in reply to solea1)
quote:
Flamenco players thought they were improvising, Paco said, but they were just reshuffling and inverting the stuff they had stolen or laboriously worked out.
Exactly like Coltrane...and Mclaughlin. Although they didn't call em "falsetas" they were certainly well rehearsed musical devices that functioned to connect "tonos" neatly together. Every music discipline has its "bag of licks" that "improvisers" draw from. It's a matter of the the specific learning discipline. There is plenty of pointless "noodling" going on as well in every genre.
I really enjoyed your post for all it's comic bitterness. In all seriousness, exceptions can be found to all the points made. I think there is an honest way to show true respect and aficion without getting all bent out of shape about being a "foreigner", but alas I encounter so much frustration and bitterness.
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