6 Oct 2004 (1st)
My lesson this evening was with Javier, a young fellow from Barcelona who lived in Sevilla for 8 years (and who sounds much more Andalucian than Catalan) and whose novia is a Sevillana. They have been in England for 8 months. One of the nice things was that we did the entire lesson in Spanish. I had been anxious beforehand about having to do a “so what can you play” exercises, since the truth is that I really cannot play anything complete at all; I can noodle around a lot, but I don’t really have any ’songs’ as such. However, we got through that and then started on a gentle Sevillanas:
E- | B7 | E- | E7 | A- | D7 | G | C | B9 | B7 | E-
but trying to do the rasgueo - the distinctive flamenco strumming of the strings with successive nails - demanded both attention and flexibility, which involved a kind of ‘concentrate, but not too hard’ mental attitude. Practice will help. Oh, there are different sorts of rasgueo, too… We moved on to a Solea after that, and I learned the correct use of the thumb (which should be used positively to ‘press’ on the lower string after hitting the upper one), as well as how to do arpeggios.