by congastu » Sun Oct 01, 2006 11:31 am
Hi all!
Just did the workshop with sergio on friday night, absolutely inspiring and everything diceman says in spot on. Not moving the other hand to make the heel toe movement is really hard at first.
Berimbau, sergio cited suzano as one of his main influences in developing his technique, especially when he saw him using fingers [not thumb] to get open tones.
Sergio commonly uses six tones- something like open, mute, slap, muted slap, jingle, and trill and all can be played with either fingers or thumb so that the ostinato of holding hand is not affected. He also demonstrated how to do this with odd time signatures and varying degrees of swing- sometimes this means that hand placement will invert itself through the rhythmic progression!
The principle was not so much to learn rhythms but to develop a technique where you can play any pattern you wish with the greatest economy of movement and without disrupting the ostinato.
sergio blew me away with two things in particular- a guaganco pattern where he plays the voice of clave, conga, tumba and shekere simultaneously and his "split finger" technique which he says he is still developing.
In this the ostinato of holding hand is complemented by another ostinato on two fingers [eg, a samba surdo line] while the remaining two fingers and thumb improvise....
dont ask me how!!!!!
Well, im off to me sunday night gig later, me and the drummer usually do a bit of pandeiro on it, but i think we will leave that alone for a bit!
stu