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Hi! I’m working on the Flamenco Voice Mastery course. Here in the style of Tangos de Cadiz. Trying to get used to the clapping and singing at once:) Thanks for any input @leo-power
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Regina Atienza, Carey Idle and 3 others12 Comments-
Ole!!!!! Well done Jenny!!! Beautiful voice !!!!!
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Wow @JennyL Sounds amazing
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Ole ese arte!
Well done Jenny. If you don’t mind me a quick tip. Instead of using a metronome use always any jam track with palmas or cajon. Let it drive you as you practice until you can fly solo. 😉
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@fernando-perez thanks for the tip!
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@JennyL yeah that’s a good point @fernando-perez Jenny if you go to the very end of the course we have those jam tracks available. And you can click in the control bar of the media player to find different versions at different tempos
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@edd This has been a really helpful suggestion. Thank you!
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@JennyL My pleasure! Remember that Compas in Flamenco is not a matter of keeping time. It has shape and it goes places. So having always a real compas sample will help you adquire that. Now jam tracks are a better than metronomes (even if you use a Flamenco Metronome). However, they are also limited because they are usually loops that repeats the same shape. Eventually try to practice singing along and doing compas with real recordings or even better, other experienced Flamenco players. Allow them to drive you through the “peaks and valleys” of the compas. The more you do it, the more you will internalize it.
Always stay relax as you practice this, give preference to feel and sound and shy away from counting and mental patterns as soon as possible. Go by what we call “El Soniquete”.1-
@fernando-perez Thank you! This explains a lot. I’ve been trying to work on listening more while I sing, rather than just learning to mimic the words. The emotional “peaks and valleys” of the letras are easy to sense but I haven’t really focused on how the rhythm of the compass drives you that way. It’s been helping my singing by making my rhythm better. As a singer with a western ear, I sadly haven’t focused on that much until now. It’s a slow but enlightening process:)
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Awesome 🔥
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@JennyL Yes, it happens to all of us. We tend to focus on things like technique, etc, thinking our singing or playing will be better and we can focus next on groove, etc.
However, there is a fastest way. And that is focusing on groove and feelings in order to drive our performance.
In Flamenco compas is the most important at teh beginning. No one in the tradition dares to sing or play an instrument without having lots of experience with palmas (clapping) and compas keeping. Only after that we go for the instrument.
If you have a solid mastery of compas you will be singing a thousand times better in terms of feeling, groove, improvisation, etc. Compas will take you to the right place so you unleash your art.
Now remember that compas is not tempo keeping. Is not linear. It needs to go places. It has shape. Learn al of that and your singing will just sync in. Then you will feel free to express Flamenco the right way, either traditionally or your own artisctic version of it.
🙂
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@fernando-perez This really makes a lot of sense. Thank you for taking the time to explain it so eloquently. I feel like this perspective deepens my potential understanding of flamenco. Could you expand on how you mentioned that it needs shape? That’s very interesting. Would you recommend just spending a lot of time clapping along to songs I like?
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@JennyL Yes, clapping along with songs will definitely help you.
Remember also that in some Palos the palmas pattern can vary. For instance, in Bulerias there are patterns in ternary, binary, or even all 12 beats cycle. So being confortable passing from one to another during the same song is important.
About shape… when we speak of rhythm in any style of music there are several layers. There is tempo keeping, rhythm playing and groove making. These are different layers or degrees of depth in what you play or sing. In Flamenco we use sometimes the word shape (only in scholar circles) to the “Vaivén” of the compas. Remember that Flamenco has the oriental tradition of cycle rhythm. Inside of the cycle there are important and less important beats. It gets tricky because important beats are not always accented so obviously. For instance, in Tangos teh first beat has lots of weigh, but we don’t mark it or accent it as obviously. However, if you miss this weigh, the rest of the compas does not fell the same.
Describing and theorizing these details is many times confusing and makes the work at hand look more difficult. However, if you just listen to lots of music but also participating in it by doing palmas, dancing to it, etc, will give you a natural intuition about all these nuances. It doe snot matter how they are call or how to explain them, if you have them down, labels and extra talking is useless.
Besides active listening, never forget that anything you practice, no matter how simple or basic it is, do it to compas. Make compas your heartbeat’s pattern and make the musical world around you move according to it.
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