Sam and I have never met, so I decided to drive up to northeastern Oregon this coming Sunday and spend a few hours with him on Monday. I can't be away too long due to obligations here in Utah, but since deciding to visit Sam I have been tempted to continue on to Portland and then down the Oregon Coast in the hope of being able to arrange visits with the well known Oregon guitar makers; Peter Tsiorba, Shelton/Farretta, and Les Stansell.

After weighing the issues I have decided to go on to Portland and then at least to the northern Oregon Coast. I am wondering if there are other forum members in northern Oregon who would like to get together along the way. Furthermore, many repeat visitors to this site have never registered, but they must be interested in flamenco or they wouldn't continue to "read the mail." Let me know if you love flamenco, you will be in northern Oregon this coming week, and you would like to meet and possibly play a little flamenco together.

-Bob

I am looking forward to tomorrows visit with Bob. It has been 25 years since I visited in person with another aficionado of flamenco. Bob plans to continue on to Portland and visit with Peter Tsiorba on Tuesday. Hopefully Bob will have some stories and photos to share from his Oregon flamenco tour. Hopefully one day my health will allow me to make a flamenco tour of the Pacific Northwest. Lots of skilled flamenco guitar makers, players, dancers, and singers from Vancouver, Canada to Southern Oregon. It would make a fun video documentary.

What great fun. Enjoy amigos. Then tell all.

Well Nigel, Bob is a much more knowledgeable and accomplished player than I. Plays several palos on compas very well and has a nice even rasqueado. Very impressive for self taught. His old Ramirez was one of the best Ramirez I have played on, very light, easy to play, and nice responsive tone. It was an enjoyable morning of live flamenco guitar and now he is headed to visit Peter and see about repairing a bad crack in the top of the Ramirez. I hope he takes photos and gives us a critique on playing Peter's flamencos. We all need to encourage Bob to record his playing and post it here on the foro. Many thanks for the visit Bob, it was great. If only we had had a singer....

I just returned from a very enjoyable trip to Oregon with the primary highlights being visits with Sam and Peter. I will provide some details about both those visits and on high-quality repairs and improvements that Peter Tsiorba made to one of my guitars after I deal with a backlog of server issues that accumulated while I was gone. None of those issues affect the Old School Flamenco Foro. One of my servers that is used by a client in Japan has developed an intermittent hardware problem of some kind and I want to determine exactly what the problem is before a local parts supplier closes at noon.

-Bob

My visit with Sam ...

It is fun to meet people personally we have known for some time only by means of written correspondence. Sam and I had exchanged many e-mails in addition to reading each other's forum posts over more than year, but had never met, so it was great to spend several hours getting to know each other better and discussing interests we have in common.

He had warned that his homebrew guitar is not as pleasant to play as his Dominguez. I have played other homemade guitars that were truly awful in most every respect, so I wasn't expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised to find Sam's guitar to be easy to play. Except for one mistake in drilling a bridge hole that he pointed out when handing me the guitar, the workmanship seemed excellent. Guitars all sound different from each other, even when made from the same types of woods, from the same plans, and by the same makers, which is why it is exciting to try different ones. Good and bad guitar sound quality is very subjective; depending to a great extent on what someone thinks a guitar should sound like and to some extent on the nature of the music to be played. Sam's guitar has a very pleasant tone that seems to me to be somewhere between that of typical flamenco and classical guitars. I think it is well suited to flamenco palos like the Peteneras, rondeña, granaína, etc., but most anything could be played successfully on it.

It also was fun to play his Dominguez and compare it to my Ramírez. Those guitars both have typical flamenco guitar sound qualities, but even so, they sound distinctly different from each other. Deciding which is best is like deciding on the best wine or the most beautiful woman. Individual judgments vary and are subject to change. The bottom-line is that Sam has a couple of fine guitars.

As everyone on the foro knows, Sam especially likes the Morón playing styles created principally by Diego del Gastor. I share his love for Morón flamenco, but Sam and I differ in that he has focused primarily on learning to play those styles while I have focused on learning to play somewhat easier classical flamenco styles that originated in other places. Modern flamenco players often scoff at Morón flamenco and make fun Diego del Gastor's playing, because he didn't play jazz chord progressions or flashy, seemingly-endless strings of picado without rhythmic expression like many modern players, but I don't know any of those players who are able to closely approximate Diego del Gastor's playing. Diego's playing is difficult to imitate because of long left-hand reaches, the need for considerable small finger flexibility and strength, and especially because of a scarcity of authentically-accurate tutorial material and/or teachers. It obviously is much more difficult to have to listen repeatedly to try to determine exactly what Diego del Gastor was doing than to read readily available cifra for other styles of traditional flamenco. That has caused Sam's progress down the road he has been following to be slower than the progress some of us have made following different routes. Even so, he has made good progress and he plays Morón flamenco far better than I or most other players of traditional flamenco are able to.


My wife and I love Oregon and drive there occasionally, so hopefully Sam and I will have other opportunities to visit in the future.

-Bob

Thanks for the nice comments on "el Negra" and my paltry attempt at playing Moron style flamenco. There are some guys selling Diego falseta collections in tab and music notation, but no good rhythm instruction. I don't want to mention any names, but one collection of falsetas is poorly written and to learn to play the falsetas on compas and still retain the melody is almost impossible using this material. His CD demos are tragic. I worked with it a couple years and finally threw it in the trash and started watching the old videos and figuring it out from there. I don't have much of a natural ear and with my nerve issues and hand damage, may never be able to play it as clean and accurate as I would like. My hearing loss hasn't helped either. The hardest thing with Moron style is the rapid and consecutive ligatos requiring a lot of pull off power with the left hand little finger and a fast and accurate right hand thumb, all the while maintaining a melody. One has to learn compas to come automatically as trying to count some of the falsetas or chord rhythm patterns is tough. I hope to record and post my version of the Moron Alegrias and Bulerias that I "attempted" to play for Bob. It was two days after Bob left before I played them acceptable and of course the recorder wasn't going. All attempts to record today were trashed. Some day, month, or year, I may get these recorded.

Bob's visit was an enjoyable morning and I wish my health would have allowed me to join the meeting with Peter the next day. Looking forward to the report on the Ramirez repairs and photos at Peter's place.

I made the mistake of installing a newly released version of PHP software on my servers early this morning and I have had to spend all day correcting problems caused by the new code. There always is a risk of problems like that when software is upgraded and it tends to be difficult to keep servers running on-line while finding and correcting problems. However, the alternative is to not upgrade regularly and have the servers hacked. As soon as I am sure everything is running normally I will post information I think you will find interesting about my visit last week with Peter Tsiorba.

-Bob

sounds like you had a great time, bob.
looking forward to hearing more about your visit to peter's shop.

I am still addressing server software issues, but while I continue to address those issues this is someone playing a Peter Tsoirba flamenco guitar in Peter's shop. Note, however, that though the playing is great, the audio quality in the recording doesn't do justice to the true sound quality of Peter's flamenco guitars. As good as modern recording technology is, there is no substitute for live audio. -Bob