We all have limited amount of time to practise (unless you are a professional of course). Sometimes it's 1 hour a day and sometimes even less. But we do want to play well and keep a steady progress. So, what do we do?

Let me tell you what NOT to do first. If you wish to get better in time, do not just noodle on the guitar. What is noodling? Picking up the instrument every once in a while to play little bits and pieces for fun, attempting to play the passages you like at full speed, blasting through falsetas you play well, etc. I think you get the picture. There is nothing wrong with noodling. I do it too. But if your goal is to develop your technique, there is another path.

Primarily, you need to understand and accept that progress is achieved through time. I get countless emails where people say: "I cannot play such and such passage no mater how hard I try." Sometimes they even send me videos so I tell them what is wrong with their technique. And 9 out of 10, the video shows a person trying really hard to play a complicated passage at full speed. They keep trying over and over again hoping that it will work one day. Let me just say that it is extremely unlikely that you can become a better player by doing this. Maybe a better guitar noodler :-)

So before I reveal to you the list of things that you need to do, let me say that I have a very busy schedule and I can practise on average one hour a day and sometime less. I am not one of those musicians that put in solid 6-8 hours every day. I try to make the best use of this limited time by keeping in mind the following:

1. Anything is playable if you slow it down to a manageable tempo. And I mean ANYTHING! Take your metronome, pick a very slow tempo and try to play the passage that's giving you trouble. Still not working? Slow it down even more. Keep going until you are able to play perfectly at that tempo. Remember this: every time you are making a mistake while practising the passage, you are practising the mistake along with the passage. So, play in slow motion. Do not play the passage fast to check if the practice is yielding results. Do not allow your ears to hear any mistakes.
2. Only after a proper warmup can you play at your full capacity. This means, during the first 10 - 20 minutes (in my case 40) be gentle with yourself. Don't expect to play perfectly. You can also do a warm up routine with scales and arpeggios before you start working on the main course. Again, the warmup needs to be slow.
3. Spend quality time with your instrument. In other words, practise with full focus and concentration. If you have 1 hour to practise, then make it an uninterrupted 1 hour. 5 mints here, 10 minutes there throughout the day do NOT add up to a full 1 hour practise. Or if you have, say, only 20 minutes, use every second of that time to focus fully on the piece you are practising. Do not get up to check email or messages, turn off your phone. Also keep in mind that PRACTISING and PERFORMING are two separate things. It's OK to PERFORM of course, but simply performing a piece for 1hour does not equal practising it.
4. Practise one thing at a time. If you have several pieces that you wish to work on, pick one for each practice session.
5. Here comes the big question: what to play. In classical guitar, one must play pieces. From start to finish that is… You cannot play a small section of Tarrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra. You have to play all of it! In flamenco, however, it's different. Flamenco guitar music is made up of short musical paragraphs called FALSETAS. Each piece you hear will be made up of these internally complete bits of music. There is not a prerequisite number and order of falsetas for a piece to qualify as 'proper.' Therefore, flamenco is a modularstyle of music with interchangeable parts.

My advice to you: play falsetas and NOT pieces.

What do I mean by that? Do not practise, say, Cepa Andaluza (buleria) by Paco de Lucia. Pick some falsetas from it and practise those. Then pick falsetas from another buleria by another artist and practise those too. Then string them together into a new buleria. Every time you practise, change the order of the falsetas.

Next thing you know, you will start squeezing in your own falsetas into the modular buleria you have been practising! And that's how you compose in flamenco. You start by playing your master's falsetas. Then in time you add more and more of your own falsetas into your performance, which eventually leads to your own compositions.

This subject line sounds a bit like "How I lost 100 pounds in 2 months," doesn't it?

:-) I even have before and after pictures, so keep reading…

In my previous blogpost I told you about how I started to practise flamenco (The Panaderos Story). Here is what happened after that.

So, the next step for me was to play machine gun picado. All I needed was practice right? I had this picado exercise that I made up in 1990, which then was only an apoyando scale drill for classical guitar. Anyhow, I got back to it. Also, to put things in perspective, I only had about an hour to practise per day. I was doing an MFA in film production and teaching at the university. So, guitar was pretty much a hobby.

Just to focus on speed, I used my hourly practice time solely for this picado exercise. I kept practising. Usually I would start at 100 BPM and raise the tempo slowly. The end result was a failure. My technique got better but speed eluded me. I  reached a plateau at around 132 BPM. Some days I'd go a bit faster than that but that's about it.

So, here is the BEFORE picture for you. I posted this video 3 years ago. Skip to the very end to see my fastest performance at the time.

Picado Agility Exercise - 1 

What did I do wrong? My practice was very focused. I raised the tempo incrementally.
Played without mistakes with a very good tone, etc.  Proper picado seemed out of reach.

Therefore, one of my core beliefs was finally confirmed: you don't acquire picado speed, you need to have been born with it. In other words, you can either play fast or not and no amount of practice will change that. I guess Paco simply had fast fingers.

That's when I started looking into the 3-finger picado venue.

In the following video you can see how this technique works.

3-finger Picado Exercise

It basically uses the natural speed burst of a m i fingers doing tremolo action. So, you play 3 notes per string using a m i and when you need to play 2 notes on one string you use m i.

Victor Monge (Serranito) uses this technique quite successfully. He is able to play super fast scales with his three fingers. And I love Serranito's music.

I started getting results with the 3-finger picado technique. I was able to play some of the fast scales from Paco de Lucia's falsetas.

Check this out:

3-Finger Picado - from Solea by Paco de Lucia

Achieving some success, I delved deeper into the technique and published a series of exercises (playlist):

3-finger Picado Exercises

However, I was not happy. Because:

1. To use 3-finger picado, you need to pre-design the scale you wish to play. Meaning, you cannot really improvise with it. For the 3-finger picado to function properly, you need to know exactly what finger goes where otherwise your fingers will simply do an  ami triplet a for each string ending up with an ugly mess
2. It is really hard to achieve the punchy flamenco tone with 3-finger picado. Remember my picado speed video. You press your fingers toward the soundboard to get the sound to project properly. But when you do a 3-finger picado run, your concern is to get the right sequence of fingers and you cannot push into the strings, especially with the ring finger.

So, back to the drawing board.

What was the secret?

I looked again at how Paco played picado and thought maybe it's the hand position and shape?

So, I tried that.

Here's me trying out the Paco right hand:

Picado Agility Exercises (Revisited - 160 bpm)

Didn't really work and it gave me a terrible ache in my right hand.

But I'm glad I tried this because it made me realize a few things:

1. The shape/position of your right hand has got nothing to do with picado tone or speed.
2. Paco de Lucia DOES NOT play picado only with the tips if his fingers. He plays from the knuckle like everyone else. The efficiency of his technique makes it look like he is only using his fingertips. Also the staccato technique keeps his fingertips always close to the string, and that's why they look motionless when he speeds up.
3. For picado speed you need to look at the way your fingers MOVE, not the way they look.
4. Fast picado is NOT the sped up version of slow picado. It is governed by a different set of rules.

This was a BREAKTHROUGH for me. I revised my practice routine. From that point on my process of learning picado was mainly a thought process rather than mindless practice (which I tried before).

I did come up with some principles which seem to work for me at least.

How to Develop Picado Speed

Here are the two picado agility exercises played at 170BPM with my newly acquired right hand technique (this would be the AFTER picture):

Picado Agility Exercises 1 & 2 (Revisited - 170bpm)

and that Paco de Lucia solea run played with 2 fingers:

Picado Exercise - Solea by Paco de Lucia

Once the technical aspects of picado speed were sorted out, I went on to create exercises specifically designed to improve picado tone and agility.

All of that is here:
http://atrafana.com/store.html#picadospeed

A CLASSICAL PLAYER DISCOVERING FLAMENCO

It was in 2003 when I seriously decided to try and play flamenco guitar.
I had not touched the instrument for about 5 years. I was terribly rusty.

I thought obtaining a flamenco guitar would be a good place to start. So, I purchased a beginner grade Manuel Rodriguez for $400. Later on I realized that this was unnecessary, but that's another story.

Panaderos is such a lovely piece and it contains very essential aspects of flamenco guitar: clockwork rhythm, two fundamental rasgueado patterns, picado, pulgar etc. I found acceptably accurate tabs on the web and started practising. As a trained classical guitarist, I started playing very slowly with the metronome, incrementally raising the speed. It sounded good.

However, after working on it for about a month (1-2 hours a day), I was unable to play the piece at full tempo. I was completely stuck at around 80 bpm. Beyond that my playing was unpleasant, the tempo would fluctuate and I would frequently miss notes.

I kept thinking "Where did I go wrong? I did everything my professor (one of Segovia's students by the way) told me to do!"

I kept watching Paco de Lucia to figure out what he was doing to achieve that speed and accuracy. I was about to conclude my quest by declaring lack of talent on my part. Then I thought: "Could flamenco guitar require a DIFFERENT technique than classical guitar?"

Here's me as a young classical player (don't laugh :-):

Danza Negra by Antonio Lauro 

Learning classical guitar I was frequently told by conservatory teachers that flamenco players did not pay attention to technique or tone or articulation blah blah blah… So, as a rule classical training gave you the best possible technique.

Well, as it turns out that was completely wrong. Despite many overlapping aspects, flamenco guitar DOES have a a technique of it's own and one needs to understand that and make the necessary adjustments to be able to play flamenco pieces. Besides, tone and articulation are as important in flamenco as they are in classical guitar.

Watching Paco de Lucia, Paco Pena, and Manolo Sanlucar on old VHS tapes and DVD's I made my first discovery that changed everything for me:


1-FREE STROKE

I always thought flamenco players played melodic lines using rest stroke picado (apoyando). So, I was trying to play everything with rest stroke picado. 

Wrong!

The fact of the matter is that flamenco guitar is played MAINLY with free stroke and they use rest stroke picado only when doing longer runs or if they want to emphasize certain notes.

So, the opening melody of Panaderos needs to be played with free stroke.

But, that is not all. Here is the second significant discovery:


2- THUMB REST STROKE

In flamenco the thumb is used MAINLY as rest stroke.

Why?

1- Thumb rest stroke provides an ANCHOR while your fingers move freely "tickling" the trebles. This way, your hand doesn't shake while playing fast passages.

2- By virtue of their special build, flamenco guitars respond better in terms of sound to thumb rest stroke. Simply put, thumb rest stroke will give you the proper buzzy flamenco sound.

Alright. Now, here is the kicker:

YOU NEED TO PLAY THUMB REST STROKE IN COMBINATION WITH FINGER FREE STROKE

Yes! Once I started implementing this new technique, Panaderos started to take off. It was awesome not having to play every single damn note with rest stroke picado and this way, especially with the thumb rest stroke, the piece sounded more flamenco.

Then I also realized that flamenco guitar incorporated 2 different hand-wrist positions. The first one used for all of the above and the second for FLAMENCO PULGAR sequences…
Let me talk about that some other time…


Here's me playing panaderos

Start here to build your flamenco technique:
Beginners