What is Technique?
A set of permanent skills that enables you to accomplish a task. It involves the brain, bones, muscles and tendons.
Where does technique reside? In the context of flamenco guitar, specifically the right hand, where exactly is the technique? Where do we observe it? And more importantly how do we gain good technique? Say, we want to play like Paco de Lucia. Where exactly do we look so we can adopt it, emulate it?
FMRI
When they have the chance, scientists examine the brains of special people such as serial killers, schizophrenics, geniuses, etc. And more often than not they don’t find much out of the ordinary in the physical structure or the tissues that make up the organ. At least, nothing that would definitively explain why that particular brain worked the way it did. They can see that Einstein has a slightly bigger brain, or schizophrenics have unusually enlarged ventricles, etc, but that’s about it.
That is why FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is more popular in analyzing the working mechanisms of the cerebral tissue. This involves observing the activity of the brain as it functions, e.i. performing a task, looking at a picture, listening to a particular piece of music. In opposition, the regular MRI scans show a static picture of the organ. Surely important in detecting organic anomalies but pretty much blind in detecting what makes a particular brain special.
You can probably see where I am going with this.
Flamenco Guitar Technique
I had and MRI of my left hand done to see if there was residual scarring left over from my injury some years ago. My hand surgeon friend said it looked unremarkable. Funny thing to say :-) In medicine this means you are fine. But, I told him, “my hand is supposed to be remarkable! I am a guitar player!” He said he could only detect some thickening of the ligaments and a general hypertrophy of the whole organ but that was about it. The point is: the key to what I am able to do with my left hand resides in the specific ways in which my muscles interact with my neurons.
Enough pseudoscience
The physical structure of your fingers and the way they are postured over the strings are only partially related to what they are capable of doing. I remember shaking Paco de Lucia’s hand after a concert and intensely looking at it to catch something special (he laughed at me) and the only thing I could detect was that his nails were very short.
That is why mimicking the hand positions and postures of other players rarely results in a satisfactory outcome. Just take a good look at the right hands of great players and see how completely different they look in the act of, say, doing a super fast picado run. I remember the first time I watched Javier Conde rip through a super fast passage (faster than Paco actually) I was shocked that his index and middle fingers were very straight and pretty much stiff.
I take this issue very seriously as a flamenco guitar teacher. Since technique cannot be physically (organically) standardized, is it not possible to teach it? My answer to that is simple, actually. Yes, physical technique cannot be standardized but teaching can be.
If I try to impose on my students a singular way of playing, say, picado (bend your fingers from the second joint and move them as little as possible), all their effort will go into satisfying this condition and 9 out of 10 students will end up either injuring themselves or inadvertently distorting this physical posture into something that works for them.
Task-based teaching
Instead of forcing a specific shape on your fingers, if I give you a well thought-out task to accomplish, however, then you will be able to focus on action and function rather than shape and appearance. Staccato is a great example for this: strike the string - rest finger on the next string - mute the vibrating string with the next finger. Or, the planting drills in arpeggio practice to gain accuracy and speed. Such tasks have already been used in classical guitar teaching which has a longer and better structured teaching history than flamenco guitar.
The design of specific exercises is also a very important part of this pedagogy. Give the player a specific musical task to perform and observe how their very own technique develops. For instance, Each one of my reflexive speed drills (link) is based on such a trajectory to enable the player to unlock the inherent speed in their fingers.
This way I am able to standardize to a certain extent my online curriculum.
Practising with this kind of operational/usable knowledge will shape your technique and you will end up with the postures and positions that suit best to your particular physique. And you will watch many beginners mimic you physically and fail :-)
I surely teach various ways you need to position your fingers and such too but it is extremely important for an educator to see the fine line between directly shaping posture via instruction versus giving practical tasks to accomplish that will enable the student to ease into their own way of playing.
So, don’t worry if your hands don’t look like Paco’s or Vicente’s. It doesn’t matter :-)
Where does technique reside? In the context of flamenco guitar, specifically the right hand, where exactly is the technique? Where do we observe it? And more importantly how do we gain good technique? Say, we want to play like Paco de Lucia. Where exactly do we look so we can adopt it, emulate it?
FMRI
When they have the chance, scientists examine the brains of special people such as serial killers, schizophrenics, geniuses, etc. And more often than not they don’t find much out of the ordinary in the physical structure or the tissues that make up the organ. At least, nothing that would definitively explain why that particular brain worked the way it did. They can see that Einstein has a slightly bigger brain, or schizophrenics have unusually enlarged ventricles, etc, but that’s about it.
That is why FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is more popular in analyzing the working mechanisms of the cerebral tissue. This involves observing the activity of the brain as it functions, e.i. performing a task, looking at a picture, listening to a particular piece of music. In opposition, the regular MRI scans show a static picture of the organ. Surely important in detecting organic anomalies but pretty much blind in detecting what makes a particular brain special.
You can probably see where I am going with this.
Flamenco Guitar Technique
I had and MRI of my left hand done to see if there was residual scarring left over from my injury some years ago. My hand surgeon friend said it looked unremarkable. Funny thing to say :-) In medicine this means you are fine. But, I told him, “my hand is supposed to be remarkable! I am a guitar player!” He said he could only detect some thickening of the ligaments and a general hypertrophy of the whole organ but that was about it. The point is: the key to what I am able to do with my left hand resides in the specific ways in which my muscles interact with my neurons.
Enough pseudoscience
The physical structure of your fingers and the way they are postured over the strings are only partially related to what they are capable of doing. I remember shaking Paco de Lucia’s hand after a concert and intensely looking at it to catch something special (he laughed at me) and the only thing I could detect was that his nails were very short.
That is why mimicking the hand positions and postures of other players rarely results in a satisfactory outcome. Just take a good look at the right hands of great players and see how completely different they look in the act of, say, doing a super fast picado run. I remember the first time I watched Javier Conde rip through a super fast passage (faster than Paco actually) I was shocked that his index and middle fingers were very straight and pretty much stiff.
I take this issue very seriously as a flamenco guitar teacher. Since technique cannot be physically (organically) standardized, is it not possible to teach it? My answer to that is simple, actually. Yes, physical technique cannot be standardized but teaching can be.
If I try to impose on my students a singular way of playing, say, picado (bend your fingers from the second joint and move them as little as possible), all their effort will go into satisfying this condition and 9 out of 10 students will end up either injuring themselves or inadvertently distorting this physical posture into something that works for them.
Task-based teaching
Instead of forcing a specific shape on your fingers, if I give you a well thought-out task to accomplish, however, then you will be able to focus on action and function rather than shape and appearance. Staccato is a great example for this: strike the string - rest finger on the next string - mute the vibrating string with the next finger. Or, the planting drills in arpeggio practice to gain accuracy and speed. Such tasks have already been used in classical guitar teaching which has a longer and better structured teaching history than flamenco guitar.
The design of specific exercises is also a very important part of this pedagogy. Give the player a specific musical task to perform and observe how their very own technique develops. For instance, Each one of my reflexive speed drills (link) is based on such a trajectory to enable the player to unlock the inherent speed in their fingers.
This way I am able to standardize to a certain extent my online curriculum.
Practising with this kind of operational/usable knowledge will shape your technique and you will end up with the postures and positions that suit best to your particular physique. And you will watch many beginners mimic you physically and fail :-)
I surely teach various ways you need to position your fingers and such too but it is extremely important for an educator to see the fine line between directly shaping posture via instruction versus giving practical tasks to accomplish that will enable the student to ease into their own way of playing.
So, don’t worry if your hands don’t look like Paco’s or Vicente’s. It doesn’t matter :-)