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I'm continually looking to find new 'good stuff', and your suggestions always bring me some new gems.
I thought it would be interesting to start a few threads giving people to share their favorite 3 pieces within the various forms - bulerias is probably the most popular, so I'll start with that.
PDL is the gold standard, and most of us are familiar with most of his catalog - so let's not include him on this one (but no penalty if you just can't resist).
What are your favorite 3 ? I know it changes - but what 3 have you listened to most, and still get inspiration when you listen again (even if you've played them out so to speak - kind of like Stairway to Heaven)
Also - have you learned to play any of your favorite 3, or at least a few of the falsetas ? Having a favorite and playing a favorite are 2 different animals : ) So many times my favorites are beyond my ability.
RE: Share your favorite 3 Non-PDL B... (in reply to joevidetto)
Dunno. Been listening to Jesus de Rosario lately so maybe this for now:
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
RE: Share your favorite 3 Non-PDL B... (in reply to joevidetto)
not sure if i hold PDL as a flamenco gold standard. His harmony is something peculiar and i can instantly describe something as having been influenced by him or not, and I'll bet you 1000 escudos that the artist will confess to the same in a double-blind-test :P don't get me wrong, it's lovely stuff. It's some kind of fusion thing, however.
------------ so, i talk a lot, bla bla bla
1) austere classic beauty
Manuel Fernández Molina ªParrilla de Jerezª - this cat could dance too (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY365Ty_if4&ab_channel=OJRTV)
----------------------------- I can't leave out vocals. Manolo Caracol most definitely uses quarter-tones etc, this is not singing out of tune.. I don't claim that this particular recording is so great, but do a little research on his collaborations with both Melchor de Marchena and Niño Ricardo, among others... vocalists one should dig into: (Agujetas, Chocolate from this more modern sound, Antonio Mairena as a bridge- an original accidentally rough voice, and a superb vocalist with a voice of honey: Antonio Molina... this belongs in another thread, but I wish to use slot #2 dedicated to Manolo Caracol
2)
--------------------- 3) too many compete for my attention, it depends upon the week. Of COURSE Moraito, Tomatito, and all the others...
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List of Arts Where Experimentation is Dangerous: 1) Sword-Combat 2) Aerial Acrobatics
RE: Share your favorite 3 Non-PDL B... (in reply to Schieper)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Schieper
Not realy into Bularias because I did not dare yet to venture there...
However I raly like the aire of Diego Del Gastor:
Diego is a rock star!
When I’m old, my hair is thin and whispy white I hope I can lead a jarga they way he could. Olé HR
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I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy, doesn't have to be fast, should have some meat on the bones, can be raw or well done, as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
RE: Share your favorite 3 Non-PDL B... (in reply to joevidetto)
This has been posted on the Foro before.
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I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy, doesn't have to be fast, should have some meat on the bones, can be raw or well done, as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
RE: Share your favorite 3 Non-PDL B... (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
quote:
Manolo Caracol most definitely uses quarter-tones etc,
Of course he does no such thing.
Of course, he absolutely does. The foro suddenly doesn't allow >8mb mp3 uploads anymore, only pictures. So here's an upload https://sndup.net/76c4 it's a snippet from 0:37-0:41 in the above youtube video clip
I can attempt to provide a frequency analytical proof, but it won't be accurate, nor could it be: Frequency analysis is literally a moving target, and even given the reality that the motor of the playback device used for digitizing this is inconstant as there is a pitch warble, etc... I could still probably provide you an actual frequency analysis to prove that this is precisely a 1/4 tone give/take a few hz)
*(IIRC you also suggested that microtonal singing is impossible with vibrato. tell that to the entire Arabic popular music world. If one is culturally habituated to 17 divisions of the "octave" (God, I really want another word for a doubling/halving of frequency, as this is so diatonic-scaled biased in meaning) instead of 12, then one can wiggle around in this system just fine.
I realize that this is an extended topic you have made your points about in many threads and I don't take contradicting you lightly, were this about tremolo technique I'd shut up, but anyone familiar with Arabic music, among other styles, will not accept the notion that Manolo is simply singing some notes sharp or flat. I'm not tying this to any "flamenco origins" mythology or anything deep... It can be as simple as Manolo hearing "exotic" singing and finding it personally interesting and flamenco-applicable. Many decisions in music are not examined in-situ as deeply as they are discussed post-hoc on forums...
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Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Share your favorite 3 Non-PDL B... (in reply to aaron peacock)
quote:
but anyone familiar with Arabic music, among other styles, will not accept the notion that Manolo is simply singing some notes sharp or flat.
I absolutely doubt this. To do the microtonal singing it has to be not only deliberate but very precisely done after lots of training and only on specific notes relative to whatever else is going on. Anything else done with the voice deliberately “in between” the equal tempered notes of a guitar or piano, is akin to SRV and other blues bending type things (essentially slow vibrato or portamento travel between fixed pitches) that you hate.
Seriously micro tone singing has a striking affect on the ear when you hear it done correctly. Neither Caracol nor any other cantaor I am aware of has had that training, and even if they did, they would know perfectly well how to do it with the guitar involved (has to be a note that is not going to clash). Most cantaores that I slow down the recording don’t even do any portamentos and such, rather, hit scale steps very deliberately despite the speed. Like when pop singers do “runs” and everyone freaks out....cante is a lot of runs, and the intent is EQUAL TEMPERED runs. Then there is vibrato which is basically portamento back and forth. Now THAT thing can be flat or sharp of course of the target pitch. That is not microtonal singing IMO.
I slowed the Caracol clip down to .25. He does a pretty well intonated chromatic phrase. C Bb A A Bb B C B Bb A Bb Ab G....G Ab A Bb...then fast “mi”....Bb-Ab-G G G G and does the vibrato on the G dropping below pitch slightly (only thing not equal tempered in the phrase he sang).
RE: Share your favorite 3 Non-PDL B... (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
I absolutely doubt this. To do the microtonal singing it has to be not only deliberate but very precisely done after lots of training and only on specific notes relative to whatever else is going on. Anything else done with the voice deliberately “in between” the equal tempered notes of a guitar or piano, is akin to SRV and other blues bending type things (essentially slow vibrato or portamento travel between fixed pitches) that you hate.
Seriously micro tone singing has a striking affect on the ear when you hear it done correctly. Neither Caracol nor any other cantaor I am aware of has had that training, and even if they did, they would know perfectly well how to do it with the guitar involved (has to be a note that is not going to clash). Most cantaores that I slow down the recording don’t even do any portamentos and such, rather, hit scale steps very deliberately despite the speed. Like when pop singers do “runs” and everyone freaks out....cante is a lot of runs, and the intent is EQUAL TEMPERED runs. Then there is vibrato which is basically portamento back and forth. Now THAT thing can be flat or sharp of course of the target pitch. That is not microtonal singing IMO.
I probably mixed up too many concepts on one go:
1) "microtonal singing" can mean so many things, as in: "these intervals do not conform to our 12 tone system" ranging from:
A) simple harmonic series (everything beyond the octave and 5th are "wrong", including both thirds) that all of non-cultural reality is based upon. certainly all physical systems.
B) to the 17 note ET system that formerly served Arabic & Persian (etc) musics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17_equal_temperament, and represented a compromise between reality as taught (by ear) and as written, such that they even made a 34 tone ET system adding quarter tones to THIS 17 note one. which has largely been supplanted in notation by todays 24 tone attempts to harmonize 2 particular cultural systems, while allowing that most of the maqams "flavor notes" are not conforming to the 24 tone (quarter tones) system, it offers "western style notation", a dubious if ubiquitous advantage (you still have to remember the real intervals by ear)
C) what you are probably referring to: dividing a "western" half-step into several divisions and playing with harmonic beating. (at the point that oscillators became digitally controlled it's possible to sequence this quite intelligently, in terms of synthesizers. analog oscillator drift can be controlled, of course, but it's not numerically specifiable, as components voltages vary with temperature, etc.) in which singing with vibrato becomes an undesired effect ruining the purity of the tonal beating. 1-10 cents can be heard, of course. compared to the crude 50 cents required to make our quarter tone.
In terms of Manolo Caracol, bearing in mind that he fused the Zambra we know today and in addition to rather "underground" cante jondo, was equally capable of cinematic and popular work, including several "faux Arabe" themed productions, as was trendy at the time, and of course the orchestra stuck with "western" cliches of Arabic sounds as filtered through our musical systems, and I could picture him having a go or two in passages here or there as an attempt to push some boundaries. ("THAT's not Moorish, THIS is!") I'm not claiming anything silly like idiomatic use of non-western scales. Training? While his voice is not as honey-like at our beloved Antonio Molina, he can do those gorgeous yodel-like warbles in an equal fashion. He comes from the longest line of cantaores ever, so there are likely family secrets etc...
On that Caracol clip, presuming I captured the correct timing (my clip is as intended) then yes, I hear 2 bookend ET notes, debatable if it's C or C#, followed at the end by a G or G# (vocalists, nor any physical-vibrational-excitational-system instrument, certainly not a moving string, cannot hit perfect notes, as you can slide a window inside a note around and it varies in pitch, as the envelope of the note will vary (guitar pluck string and the percussive attack with the pitch bent upwards going down to the target note, followed by some rebounds in pitch fluctuation, etc...)) but regardless, i hear a mostly perfect fourth down there in terms of beginning on C and ending on G (song being in G)
between these 2 bookends there are 2 segments with a G in the middle, the latter half in ET (a riff with G, G# and A#), and the former half (NOT ET) is significantly so, and seems intentional Manolo is dead, so we can't ask him. We could ask modern cantaores if they ever considered augmenting note choices and were aware of possibilities etc. It's not much more work to achieve. (side note, your tips on intonation in the playing technique, or at least Piwins distilled ideas of this, are precisely how many Arab world guitarists survive the avoid notes or missing notes, well that and string bending, and, well, not playing what you can't play)
you can verify that it's not capstan variance or motor fluctuation by the precise guitar offbeat chord strums precisely on the same note both times.
I'm not sure what your "slowing down" software does, but bearing in mind that slowing down windows of sound will mean copying chunks of sample values and interleaving them to fill space. it cannot pull samples out of thin air and must have some values, so it repeats existing ones. depending upon if the algorithm interleaves individual samples or buffers/windows of samples, it may be giving incorrect pitch information with regards to sounds that change in pitch over the course of their envelope (especially the voice.) worth a mention... I manually looped selected windows of the "bookend" notes and found that my window placement and size had a massive effect. (60-70 cents at times)
but anyway, I owe you some bulerias so... in keeping with the theme of this post (vague Orientalism that would make a 19th century writer blush with embarrassment), and again, no origins of flamenco mythology stuff here, even though that's *always* been very plastic in meaning, since the "club of '98" and the anti-flemenco-ists. My apologies for the terrible sound. It had to be 'bulerias'
It's a pity that this cat rarely does Bulerias (and that this video is only audio), but he's a great
Posts: 14801
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Share your favorite 3 Non-PDL B... (in reply to aaron peacock)
quote:
i hear a mostly perfect fourth down there in terms of beginning on C and ending on G (song being in G)
between these 2 bookends there are 2 segments with a G in the middle, the latter half in ET (a riff with G, G# and A#), and the former half (NOT ET) is significantly so, and seems intentional Manolo is dead, so we can't ask him.
Well we have to disagree on this. As you can see in my video the first part passes chromatically from B natural to C, it seems that chromatic alteration is giving you an impression that the note is deliberately altered at the micro level. Consider the harmony. Cm moving to Bb-Eb. If the note in question is the one I hear as B natural, I don’t understand what would be the microtonal basis for that in context. The Arabic equivalent where we see a microtonal distinction often made would correspond to the A natural vs the Ab portion of the melody. Instead we see him execute fairly clear chromatics in that area, otherwise the hard bending would be required as you see me doing between F# and G at the very end. THAT note is not on my guitar neck and to match it I have to do that bending thing.
Here is an example that shows the striking difference between microtones.
This video shows how a certain micro tone (out of 22 shrutis per octave) is used to intonate the Lydian scale (16:50) to make sweet intervals against the root 5th drone:
In theory terms what is going on at 16:50 is a construction based on three triads that are tempered mathematically, D-F#-A, E-G#-B, and A-C#-E....such that the resultant mode is D-E-F#-G#-A-B-C#...and the E note is slightly sharp, the F# flat, the G# flat etc, and I am not sure if the octave E (9th) is true octave or not, it might not be. The scale is like a sweetly tuned lydian scale...but we can see the basis of A major via the IV-V-I chords was used and thus, any A major key song could be played with this, however the drone on D keeps the ear grounded on Lydian. The point of ET is that as sweet and etherial as the above modal music sounds, you can’t change keys mid song (tonality) without changing the chosen “shruti” or microtones that were used to construct the mode. I mean you CAN but it will sound horrible and out of tune if you do that. This is the basic principle behind the not mixing modality with tonality, or rather, keeping the ideas separated. In modality the tuning is super important because the microtones are considered DIFFERENT NOTES (shrutis). Hence doing Yaman on guitar fails because we can’t use the correct shrutis (unless we do some very precise bending, which hopefully my tuning video shows is almost impossible to do because of the fret/string malleablity). Instead we have western “lydian” which is always ready to modulate to a different key with ease thanks to ET tuning. If a western singer or string player happens to hit a “correct shruti” while playing, it is INCIDENTAL! Quite different than the DELIBERATE AVOIDENCE of the wrong shrutis.
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