Flamenco Workshop With Rafael

Last week on Tuesday we had a Flamenco Workshop with Rafael who taught about us about the art of flameco. Rafael has been playing flamenco guitar for a very long time now and he has worked with lots of people to help compose music. He has also toured and accompanied proffesional flamenco dancers so he has a lot of experience. I had always been familiar with the term flamenco, but I had never properly looked into what flamenco is. Flamenco comes from spain and it includes such things as singing, guitar playing, dancing, hand clapping and finger snapping.

One of the main things we learmt was to clap in 12. The 12-beat cycle is usually played, this is how we learnt it, with accents on the 3rd, 6th, 8th, 10th and 12th beat (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12). I didn't know how to count in 12 before and this was something very interesting that I learnt that I hope to use in my own music. Flamenco playing is very percussive and the bassist from Primus, Les Claypool, has a very pecussive stye of playing that has similarities to flamenco. I could incorporate these techniques of playing into my original music with my band to help add dynamics.

Something quite important that I picked up on from Rafel's workshop was that you should try and explore all sorts of abstract styles of music to then bring forward to your playing to help make you an original artist. I say abstract but what I realy mean is all different types of genres that I may currently not be familiar with. It's best to be open minded when it comes to listening to music. As Frank Zappa once said, "A mind is like a parachute, it doesn't work unless it's open." I plan on listening to music with different rhythms rather than the standard 4/4 beat that we hear in lots of music. I want to create some music with completely different rhythms.