Flamenco Practice Yields Better Guitar Playing
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since this project got underway - as always with recording, it takes longer than it appears likely at first but with a studio in another city as the primary, it certainly takes longer.
In any case, I have been working along in the back end of the project, in that I continue to practice and jam. I recently swapped lessons with my friend Brian - he needed to learn the basics of CSS formatting for HTML and I needed a guitar lesson or two, so we did the swap. Now all I have to do is apply discipline.
With the improvement in discipline that has come from taking Flamenco lessons, my overall musical abilities have also improved. In fact, the Flamenco lessons have resulted in now six+ months of very regular (daily) stretching sessions that have gotten more intense as the weeks have gone by, plus the dancing practice. Several weeks back, I realized that I could manage the footwork needed for Flamenco. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but, in fact, it’s a big step (think Spanish tapdancing).
I managed this trick as a direct result of one straightforward bit of practice - every day, at the end of the stretching session, I would stand on one foot with the other raised off the floor, bend a knee (in order not to raise the body) and lift the heel only of the foot on the floor, hold it for a tic and set it back down. I began doing that ten times on each foot; I’m now at fifty times per foot. Midway through this, I happened upon a video of a Flamenco dancer named Eva La Yerbabuena, who is one of the most highly regarded dancers in the Flamenco world. While watching her dance, I noticed that the rapid-fire taps were done by alternating tacons, taps made with the heel. She was just very fast at it. So I gave it a try and, sure enough, I found that I could make alternating tacons very quickly (though not at the speed of Yerbabuena). Suddenly, a whole section of the dance opened up and I realized that I could do the footwork, which had been the most difficult aspect of the dance. What a kick!
So getting a grasp on the footwork, I began to see that I could move around the floor in time to the music, making tacons as I pleased. I found a video of a male Flamenco dancer named Israel Galvan, whose style is unorthodox but very interesting; I could see that there was room for men in the Flamenco world. So now I practice every day and ‘jam’ with the Flamenco tunes: I dance around with the various arm and hand motions that I’ve learned so far.
Now all I need is for the assorted problems afflicting Flamenco Louisville to get worked out so I’ll have a teacher. And, of course, I practice my new guitar lessons, which focused on learning triads to go with my knowledge of scales.