I just bought my son (9 years old) his first electric guitar and amp. We are both stoked. I showed him a couple things and left him alone to play for awhile. Later, he came out of my room and started asking me a bunch of questions.
I was telling him about classical guitar and how those acoustics have much wider necks and don’t feature all metal strings like my Yamaha acoustic does. I wanted to show him an example of the classical guitar players vampire fingernails (“Dad, if they don’t have a pick then how can they play?”) and I stumbled upon an Edgar Cruz video.
It was his version of Bohemian Rhapsody, seen here: - YouTube
I had never heard of this guy. I watched and listened and was like :eek:
How come I never heard of this guy? Jesus, just what I needed…another reminder of not only how insignificant I am as a casual player, but also how far behind the curve I am.
Surely some of you guitarists have seen/heard of him before. Has he ever been mentioned on here? If not, why not?
I don’t know much about guitars but to my very untrained ears he seemed to be mixing two styles. Spanish guitar (Random youtube link in case that’s the wrong term) and what I think of as a strolling Roman guitar player when I think of movies or plays that took place in ancient Rome. I’m having trouble finding a good link, but think Italian Restaurant.
ETA, I should mention that I did like it (in case it didn’t come across that way in what I said).
If you read his bio on his webpage, his Dad was in fact a strolling guitarist that told his son “play what they want to hear and they will pay you good money”…and then both he and his brother took up the trade. Look up his other Youtube videos and his medleys. He is fucking good.
And I think you mean flamenco, JoeyP…where he strums with his fingers on his right hand in rapid succession…and damn, what a right hand. And left. Some of the stretches he accomplishes with that wide classical acoustical neck make my wrist cry.
Flamenco huh? Is that what I’m thinking of when I think of “Spanish Guitar”?
Either way, every time I listen to a bunch of clips like this I end up watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona again. It’s a great movie that features some music like this.
It seems Edgar can do both. There’s no denying the talent of Flamenco players…but they seem to be rigidly within a certain style of thrumming, especially when it comes to chords…where classical players are not similarly constrained.
I am constantly amazed by the ability of some of these players to use their right hand to articulate complicated passages. It makes me feel, as an aspiring bluesman, as a beginner. Hence Ralph Macchio beating Steve Vai. Classical music on acoustic guitar is often amazing and sometimes boring. The same can be said for flamenco or any genre where there’s too much of a good thing. They are all amazing players.
I am constantly amazed by players (Like Stanley Jordan) that cover modern rock songs in their own inimitable way. Edgar has satisfied that curriculum for me. He’s fucking amazing.
When my uncle was in a VA center with Alzheimer’s, the center hired Cruz to come and play one Sunday. He’s a very bright and talented guy, and as one of the Youtube commenters said, very unassuming. After playing his scheduled repertoir he would take 8 or 10 requests at a time and then play 30-second or so snippets of the songs in the same order as requested. He brought his wife and child to the show too, which was held in the recreation room, and she sold CD’s of his albums from a table set up before the show. Cruz was a very nice and personable guy, happy to talk afterwards with anyone for as long as they wanted. I waited in line for a while to thank him for playing my request and to tell him how much I enjoyed his playing, but my uncle became impatient and so we had to leave before I got a chance to do so.
It’s all about pay-offs and compromises, I think. You could spend a lifetime mastering flamenco guitar, but you’re still only playing a tiny fraction of what the guitar is capable of.
So while I can admire the skill and dedication that goes into that, as a guitar player I never feel intimidated by it, even though I’ll probably never achieve that level of technical mastery, because I’m doing my own thing.
I find this a rather odd assertion. If you mean that dedicated flamenco players can deploy flamenco technique better than classically-trained players, then yes, of course this is true. They are specialists at what they do. But if you mean that flamenco guitarists are in some way superior to classical players, well, I just don’t know how you could substantiate that view. The classical guitarist is aiming for a comprehensive technique than can cope with any technical demands a particular piece may make, no limits. They have to be able to cope with just about anything you can place in front of them. A flamenco guy just has to be really, really good at flamenco.
That’s a great story. I love it when people whom are supremely talented at what they do and have some fans because of it are also unassuming, down to earth people. There are many that allow egomania to consume their persona.
Wow. That guy is clearly talented. I like his percussive elements in the Tunisia piece. And man, he’s got that left hand stretch that only players of a classical acoustic with its fat neck can manage. Amazing. He kinda looks like the Keith Richards of classic guitar…which of course makes him even cooler in my book.
Why is fingerpicking so hard? I like to attack the strings in many respects, but fingerpickers have that undertstated, melodic, multi-harmony/melody thing going on that I would love to learn. I can barely manage to fingerpick my way through “Dust In The Wind”, which I know is an easy chord progression.
I look at classical players and I see their fingernails on their right hand and I’m like…“nope”…because I bite my fingernails.
My playing is absurd. I up-pick as often as I down-pick and I use the inside of my right middle finger as I up-pick to generate artificial harmonics or other sounds. I palm mute a lot.
I just can’t envision myself using all the fingers on my right hand to pluck alternate melodies all at the same time. Is that a hand training thing or a brain training thing?
Crap. I am 41 and I feel the battle is being lost on my end. I want to be so much better than I am, even if its just for my own satisfaction.
Both. My friend Rev Peyton wound up damaging his hands from playing too much and too hard and was in excruciating pain. The doctor told him that he had to quit playing, and he didn’t play guitar for a year, working as the night clerk at a hotel. But he spent that year imagining playing guitar. After that, a different doctor worked on his hands, cutting out scar tissue. Once he healed, he had more flexibility and could finger-pick. Here’s a video I shot of him teaching about fingerstyle.
If you really want to learn ‘fingerstyle’ in any of its manifestations, whether that’s classical RH technique, flamenco technique, folk, country, bluegrass, jazz, hybrid picking, thumb picking, whatever - it isn’t that hard. Put the pick down, start out easy and don’t move on to hard stuff until the easy stuff is fluid.
A teacher is a really good idea.
We hear flat pickers in all their stages of development, from the very basic to the sophisticated. We don’t tend to hear as many fingerpickers who aren’t fully developed, and a lot of the fingerpickers we hear are monster players. Skews the sample a bit…
Swamped at work, but I couldn’t let a guitar thread go unposted
**FGiE **- nice link; Edgar Cruz is a great player.
IANAClassical Player; I can play some fingerstyle blues and rockabilly so I understand the contrapuntal, multi-tasking nature of the beast. Fun stuff.
However, separate from that, and speaking more as a musician, I will say this: that video clip by Cruz is technically brilliant - I could never hope to approach his technique - but a bit flat musically. That may be due to the fact that he is playing in service to an instructional video. But when I watch him, my mind fills in the cool music context of Queen, but I tend to think “wow, what a finger spread” or “wow, his mastery up and down the next is breathtaking.” That’s all well and good, but more about craft than art.
When I pulled up **Le Ministre’s **links to Night in Tunisia and the Chopin piece, I thought “wow, what a fucking great musician” - once Dyens gets past the poppy-percussive stuff and into the main body of the song, it just swings with groove. And the Chopin piece sounds like flowing liquid notes in a way that Cruz’s interpretation of BH didn’t for me. That guy is on a whole 'nother level to my ear.
YMMV.
ETA: oh, and do I wanna know how much Dyens guitar cost? That thing sounds amazing over my crap desktop speakers; I can just imagine what it can do in person. Amazing low end with no muddiness - supports the mids really well.
Here is a list price for one of the makers that Dyens has been known to play and record with - Fanton D’Andon. $21,500. is the figure.
I would also point out that the Roland Dyens clips are all from a professionally recorded DVD, (I believe - I don’t own a copy, and I haven’t viewed the table of contents.) and the Dyens has spent years of his life devoted to playing beautiful, sustained notes when the music calls for them. Edgar Cruz seems to prefer to have a lot more initial attack, esp. on his bass notes. I don’t think that’s just the recording techniques, although I think the Cruz recording could have had much better sound. That’s a major distinction between flamenco and classical playing styles, and the guitars are made accordingly, with less sustain built in to the flamenco instruments so that the percussive attack is more effective.
