Re: Bass lines in salsa


"Derek Tearne" <derek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1hljz9c.1hadmay1si8k3kN%derek@xxxxxxxxxxxx
bassman2 <vince_angeloni_1@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Derek Tearne wrote:

Oh, and you've got it just about totally the wrong way round. It's
trivial to write down and explain, but damned hard to play until, as I
mentioned earlier, you internalise the clave.

--- Derek

Uhm.I thought this is what I wrote...never mind...

What you wrote was "probably best played than trying
to write it down and explain it..." - and often in music there are
things which are really easy and intuitive to do which are terribly
difficult to write down and explain.

However, pretty much everything you need to know to understand latin
music can be put down simply on a couple of pages. In fact, the section
of Rebeca Mauleon's book which distils this is ten pages long, and that
includes the historical context and derivation, the four bars of
essential music in standard notation *and* the half page summary.

Exercise 1 is five lines long, two bars, nine notes you can practice
that for months and still get tripped up - well that's my experience
anyway. I think I'm doing fine until I realise I've turned everything
round and I've swapped hands or feet or something. Extend that by
playing a basic four note tumbao instead of the 'pulse', and playing
forward and reverse and you've got your next year of technique practice
right there.

Carlos Del Puerto's 'true cuban bass' is a *thin* book - 40 bilingual
pages, as is "Funkifying the Clave, afro-cuban grooves for bass and
drums".

I don't think I'll ever absorb all of the stuff represented by those
three books.

This is the thing with latin music, it's simple to describe, easy to
listen to and it has that rolling two bar feel that demands your body to
dance, but really, really, hard to play properly - especially for pasty
white guys like me who started out learning tunes in 4/4 or 6/8 that had
little syncopation or polyrhythm and at best had a widdly widdly triplet
feel.

The hard thing (as somebody already mentioned) is not playing on the "one",
but you still have to feel it to stay in time. Once you've got that - well,
you're
still not all they way there but at least you're maybe halfway there.

If you want a challenging experience, get a salsa record and try to
duplicate
the basslines to the point where you can't hear *any* difference between
your rhythm and the rhythm on the record. It's like the advanced
postgraduate course in syncopation and polyrhythms.

- Gary Rosen


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