Aficionados,
I hope some of you will like these granainas. Although I learned the basics from Juan Martin, I added materials from Sabicas, one "Nino de Alicante" (I believe Ramon pointed out that his real name is Mario Escudero) and my own dilettante brain .
Saludos
Roland

Roland
That was really beautiful , thank you for posting it .
Victor

Very nice Roland
Granainas is one of my favourite toques. It uses such a wide range of techniques. A little something for everyone. I like that B phrygian sound.
You have a very smooth triplet rasqueado (the C cord toward the beginning of the piece). What finger are you using if you don't mind my asking? I never get that smooth sound and usually end up feeling my thumb nail will rip off when I practice more than 3 min.
I am currently working on Clara fuente by Paco Pena and La Plateria by Sabicas (with a little Paco del Gastor and Fernando Sirvent thrown in for good measure)
Ed

Victor and Ed,
Thank you very much. Glad to hear you liked it.

Ed,
The triplet rasgueado I am playing in the video is pai. For a long time I used to play pei (taught by Andres Batista, a great admirer of Sabicas who performed with the late Carmen Amaya) but recently switched to pai. They are similar but with pai you can get a more focused and more percussive sound. The first version I learned (from Juan Martin's book) was pmp, but nowadays I play it rarely because it is a real nail killer. I think it's great when you are looking for a very percussive sound (like dance accompaniment or fast rumba).
Also, I think pai and pmp are quite different in execution. With pai you can beat the strings or slide over them; you can control the sound by the distance of you fingers from the strings and by how much you push with your fingers in addition to rotating the wrist. With pmp you really beat the strings with the fingers, with all the movement coming from the wrist, keeping the fingers loose. It is important that the angle of your wrist and distance of your hand to the strings are optimal. I often lift the arm a bit off the guitar to get a steep enough angle of the thumb to the guitar and relax the wrist. Depending on the sound you want, you can just barely touch inside strings using only rotation of the wrist (like some modern players do) or move the wrist slightly up and down to get a forceful percussive sound across all strings(like Juan Maya Marote).

It would be great if I could listen to your version of Clara fuenta/La plateria when you are ready.
Cheers,
Roland

Thanks Roland
I have seen the pai method in a few transcriptions that I bought from Alain Faucher but never gave it serious try. It felt very awkward and after having spent considerable time learning the pmp or pap technique, I just substituted. I will sometimes use a pii method to save my thumb, but somehow it only seems to sound right in a member of the fandango family.
Anyway your video has inspired me to put some serious effort into learning that technique but it won't be overnight. As far as putting together a granainas of my own, that will be a while. I can play most of the individual sections that you have on your video well enough with several variations of each, but putting them together as a smooth composition gives me a problem. Perhaps too many choices.
I applaud your courage in putting yourself on videos. I quite enjoy them. Keep them coming. As soon as I turn on a mic. I seem to have too many fingers on one hand and not enough on the other.
Ed

Thank you, Ed
I understand you well. The camera also makes me uncomfortable and sometimes very self-conscious, to the point that my fingers can loose all direction .
Regarding pai, Paco de Lucia, Tomatito, Gerardo Nunez, Vincente Amigo, Juan Carmona, Pepe Habichuela, and Moraito all use it in some context. Depending on the context you can also play it downwards (aip) instead of upwards on the beat.
Good luck with it.
Roland

Roland, very well played and captures the aire and feel of the palo nicely. I enjoyed watching your video as always. That old guitar is really nice. I avoid the granainas because of the arpeggios and tremolo required. I could modify it to my style, but it loses much of the feel. Never could do a smooth triplet rasqueado with any speed, so that also adds more kill joy to it. I played a version of it back in the 70's I learned from Luis Maravilla material, but that has all gone from my memory years ago. I haven't experimented with using a webcam and recording videos yet. Need to get a quality webcam and learn how to do it. I have been able to hold the guitar traditional flamenco style (as I did in the 70's) now for over a month and slowly getting all my material down holding the guitar traditional. Very impressed with the smoothness of your playing on the granainas.

Sam,
As always, thank you for you encouraging comments! My own audio setup leaves much to be desired and has been a source of frustration. I have a logitech webcam with software included. It was easy to set up but can't handle the treble of my flamenco guitar, if I dig in, even if I move quite far away from the camera. I also have a blueball (HD) camera/microphone but couldn't get it to work properly, even when using direct recording with youtube's software. My computer probably has not enough memory.
Roland