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I had an afternoon off today and was playing around with some basic Tomatito "cante accomp" stuff. Some things sounded better than others. Looking at it it really closely, it's actually the LEFT hand which really gets the Flamenco sound (assuming you can do the basic RH stuff). The finger pressure constantly modulates between "full" and "damped", letting some notes sustain and others not. This is so quick and changes from note to note, that you hardly even notice it.
There is no way you could ever indicate this graphically, in tabs or score IMO.
LH plays an important part, but honestly it is mainly the right hand achieving the sound. Classical and flamenco LH style is not as terribly different as the RH style. LH has more to do I feel with subtle personal differences between players of the same genre. For example PDL vs Nino Ricardo.
The perfect test is to have someone else learn the same passage as yourself, but play the RH part and you reach over and do the left hand yourself on the same guitar to see how different the sound really is between the two of you. The person doing the RH will have more of the overall "sound" and personality come through, the person doing LH will be getting very small things of his own style in there, less noticeable.
I dunno Ricardo, I feel that this "Flamenco is all in the Right Hand" stuff is a bit like folk saying "Wow..you must really need long nails to play that!"
The Left hand in Flamenco is not just making chords and pressing fully on strings, but is constantly varying in pressure to get the attack/decay sound and is worthy of close examination by any Flamenco student IMO. Not just for accuracy etc...but the way it is used in Flamenco to get the overall sound.
I really don't think you could (theoretically) line up Julian Bream playing LH and Tomatito playing RH and expect it to sound close to verdadura Flamenco IMO. No way.
Left hand is so important to your sound, many players have a muddy sound because they don't focus on leaving the left hand fingers down as long as possible.
I agree Ron,,,,,,,,,
Give me a guitar with one string and I will show you something hahahahahahhahaha
A good guitar player can make a piece of crap sound good.
A crappy guitar player can't make anything sound good...hahahhahaa
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May we find God through Flamenco instead of Angels and Demons
no way guys..it is all in the attack of the RH as previously mentioned. It is the way you play rest strokes, and the angle of your nail attack w/ the RH, etc... you ever heard a good classical guitarist learn a falsetta and then play it to you? the notes are right but the sound is FAR from flamenco. If you observe the right hand, it is all there..
LH...RH...who knows? I always thought no matter what tone you seek, it was usually the result of the trinity of mind/hand/guitar. So, if I had to pick one thing that was more responsible for a particular sound, it would have to be the corpus callosum! But, then again, I can't play in compas without my Flamenco Master metronom, so what do I know?
On my old guitar ( ricardo sanchis 1 af ) I played agrresive and with much force, to get a flamenco sound.
On my new guitar (gerundino) I don't need to play loud or aggresive. It has the right sound from it's own. So now it's easier to concentrate on "tension-less playing".
So for me the instrument is very important.
( just an opinion of a freeloading payo )
Ps: I don't want to say the sanchis is a bad guitar. I enjoyed it for quite some time. It plays very easy. But it's no gerundino.
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