Iglesias Guitars

Today I got to meet Ramon Iglesias. In his younger hippy days he traveled to Barcelona, Spain and Italy to study guitar making. Then he went to the US to work for Martin guitar company in 1977. He returned to Guatemala to continue making electric guitars and bases because of the quality of hardwoods found in areas of Guatemala like Peten, Coban and Escuincle. The more interesting part about his shop was the machines. He built a circular saw for making the frets out of an old photocopier.

In addition, he took a microscope used for checking eyes and now uses it to make sure his fretboard is lined up correctly. At this interview I realized that I was asking less “how do you do that” type questions and instead asked more specific question about what materials he uses to accomplish such and such. This was a confirmation that hey, I actually learned something on this trip!

Guatemala Vanguard Musician

http://www.prensalibre.com/pl/domingo/archivo/revistad/2004/noviembre04/141104/dfrente.shtml

I was surprised to find out about Joaquin Orellana, a very modern compositor and vanguard instrument maker.

He derived sound devices from the marimba. I'm thinking about jumping in an continuing his cause while in Guate.

To get me started I'm reading "Tradiciones de Guatemala No. 66 Etnomusicologia en Guatemala"

What does golf have to do with jazz?

That's Roberto, whom I met at Palermo Golf Club a few weeks ago. After the usual explaining my Watson project, he asked what instruments I play, he showed me his drum key. It turns out that he has been playing the drums since he was 15 and now plays in a small jazz group.

Yesterday he invited me to listen to his group play. The guitarist was still on vacation so there was only sax and trombone. It was pretty sweet and I was invited back to learn some jazz beats.

Tecson

This week I started sound engineering classes at Tecson, here in Buenos Aires. I realize how much I just f-ed around with mixers and digital recorders. I also realized how much I learned about microphones at Audio Engineering Associates and basic electronics from Caltech. One class this week covered decibels to measure sound pressure levels and I was able to derive on paper the numbers that they just listed as given. This was pretty simple but I felt good remembering this after months of not doing any math, jaja.

I also get to learn really cool stuff like DI boxes, especially the Red Box with speaker emulation.

I'm also messing around with sound programs (Acustica Mixcraft cuz ProTools is too expensive for me right now) and VST plugins. This makes me almost give up on free plugins that supposedly take out the vocals.

On a side note, I heard this back in Barcelona and now I finally found out (through watching tons of MTV):

Destination Calabria

Favorite Band

I've decided that my favorite band is Cafe Tacuba. Two nights ago I watched them on my hotel's cable tv playing at Viña Del Mar, Chile. They rock! With Aryan I played one of their songs for Caltech's Metal Night: Ingrata.

2007 Viña del Mar: Tirate
2007 Viña del Mar: Las Flores

Viva Mexico Cabrones!!!

Speaking of bands, last night I went to a club (Jamuy) that had a 5 Bol. cover charge and the band Sol Mayor played. The funny part is that I thought the band name refered to the sun, but actually its translation would be G Major, jaja. I saw some awesome dancing to the andean music. The band had an electric drum set, two wind people playing quenas and zampoñas, a woman singer, a charango and guitar. The charango was a shiny acousticelectric one. Good stuff, and with the cover charge we got a free mixed dring shot. I think it was pinaple juice and ron.

Mi Carro

There's a television channel that plays music videos, TeleTaxi. Its in catalan, but most of the videos are in castellano. One of my favorites from this summer is "Mi Carro" a cover by El Koala.

To see the video haz click here: The rock cover

The original was done by Manolo Escobar in 1969: Original

Now if only I knew how to sing. Here are the lyrics:

Mi carro me lo robaron estando de romería
Mi carro me lo robaron anoche cuando dormía

Dónde estará mi carro.
Dónde estará mi carro.

Me dicen que le quitaron los clavos que relucían
Creyendo que eran de oro de limpios que los tenía.

Dónde estará mi carro.
Dónde estará mi carro.

Donde quiera que esté mi carro es mío,
porque en él me crié allá en el río,
si lo llego a encontrar, vendrás conmigo
en mi carro de amor por el camino

Les digo, por el camino hablando con los romeros
que lleva sobre sus varas Antonio grabado a fuego.

Dónde estará mi carro.
Dónde estará mi carro.

En mi carro gasté una fortuna,
en mis noches de amor llevé la luna
Preguntando busqué por todas partes
y por fín lo encontré y s’acabao.

Ska's Not All Fun and Games

With all the street festivals in Barcelona, I saw a bunch of ska bands. The flavor is a bit different than I was used to in California. Back there when I heard bands like Reel Big Fish, and Suburban Legends the songs were more fun and games. Suburban Legends played in Downtown Disney.

In Barcelona, ska and punk are the styles that young people use to be political. One group was pro Catalan independence, another yells grievances against the police. Not only are these kids more well informed, but they also play kickass music to spread the word. Back in Cali punk used to be like that, but now pop punk is all about skateboarding and girls (which I enjoyed).

Festa Major de Gracia

Wow, this was the biggest street festival EVER! A weeklong event of music, food and fun. Even before the event began I went online (http://www.festamajordegracia.cat/) and looked up the acts.

All I can say is that the decorations of the street reminded me of building Interhovse parties. I was also in the midst of street fireworks!

Blisters

I've grown out the nails on my right hand to help me play guitar. It feels weird typing with nails, much harder to hit the keys correctly. I also have a blister on my thumb that prevents me from playing guitar every day. At the beginning of August I played for a few hours straight one day and had to stop playing for a week until my blister popped and became callous again.
In other news, today is the first day I actually noticed a piezoelectric pickup (like the one shown above). There was a guy in the metro playing the guitar with one of these. Very timely as I have been reading about the "tapa armónica" which is the front piece of the guitar body where the pickup is placed. The book describes the need for the wood to resonate and I wondered the effect of the pickup. It is definitely negligible especially considering that I press onto the body with my middle and annular fingers when I pluck with my thumb. Anyways, just a thought.

While I'm at it, another thought is about optically imaging the "tapa armónica" to map out its modes. The only thing regarding optical imaging I've found so far (I haven't searched hard) is someone using light to pickup guitar fingerings.

Busker's Festival

August 2-5 was Bursker's Music Festival in Barceloneta. About 12 bands lined the streets each day along the port and the beach of Barceloneta.
Los Pacos was the first band I saw. They sang hilarious rock music and even covered "la puerta negra" which is a tejano song that I played for Dabney Metal Knight. I liked their matching red converses and ties as well as the cajon instead of a drumset.
What I was really excited to listen was a rumba band called Rumbé (I even bought their shirt afterwards). I stayed here for almost their entire set. In addition to the music, they had a Russian performer in training that did pole climbing. He did acrobatics on a pole they setup until he ripped his pants. What was amazing was that he slid head down about five meters and stopped five cm from the ground. I did a brief mastering of the recording I made of them and gave them to mi morrita to listen. The cool thing about all these street festivals is that there is no rule against recording if I don't sell them.
A fun band was Pegatina that had a guy on stilts pumping the crowd. The style is rumba-reggae. Then moving onto folk internacional bands there was Gattamolesta:
This band had a few vagabonds dancing in front.
As I kept walking down the beachfront I made it to a tango group called Violentango.
The rest of the bands were variations on rock and weren't as impressive or fun as the above mentioned bands.

There is a difficulty with my M-Audio recorder when recording sound reinforced concerts because of the loudness. There is a lot of clipping that occurs, especially with the bass drums and snares.

Fiesta Major de Poble Sec

My second Fiesta Major was last weekend in the barrio of Poble Sec. The way I found out about this festival was walking back from visiting Montjuic and seeing the fliers on the walls. On Saturday July 21, Rachel Hall has asked me if I wanted to meet up for dinner. When we met up I told her about the festival and so we trekked over to Poble Sec. The first stage we arrived at (each street had a stage with 5 or 6 stages total) was a dance group composed of elderly women and dancing a southern style. After the dancing came an elderly man singing a few songs and then began the bingo. Needless to say that this was the retirement stage.

Barcelona is an international city and so every little barrio has their own mixture of immigrants. In Poble Sec there is a large group of Dominicanos and so one of the stages was a group that right away I recognized sounded like Aventura. Then later on they played some covers by that group.

Now it was about 10pm and time to eat dinner. We went into a small dinner and to our surprise began a show like the Buena Vista Social Club. The first act was a man singing Cuban songs and afterwards came out the owner of the restaurant. She was a woman that was definitely past 40, but also very well kept because she came out in a Las Vegas showgirl outfit!!! Thus, this was one of the most interesting dinners I've had and the food was new also. I forgot the name of what I ordered, but it was white meat on top of a huge piece of bread.

Univesity of Barcelona

Last week I went to two shows at the University of Barcelona (UB). Behind the old two story stone building of UB is a garden where bands played Tuesdays and Thursdays in July. One night the music was a colorful gypsy folk band and the other night there was an English soft rock band. Most of the students of UB in the audience were foreigners. I heard some very different and interesting accents in Spanish.
My floormate, David Visvanathan, is from Denmark and is studying this next term at UB. I got lucky that he's into music so that we inform each other about what concerts are coming up.

International Workshop on Computation Music

On Monday I went to visit L'Auditori de Musica and Found that there was a school of music ESMuC (Escuela Superior de Musica de Catalunya) in the same building. As I was reading the announcements on the bulletin boards (which is difficult because things are written in Catalan...more on that later) I saw one showing that there was the 4th International Workshop on Computational Music Theory to be held this week (http://www.esmuc.net/sonologia/iwcmt07/index.html#program). In addition, the group hosting the workshop is from the Music Technology Group of University of Pompeu Fabra which I was planning to visit anyway because of their cool research into music synthesis (http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable/?media).

I was indeed lucky because their topic of music similarities would be using Flamenco music as their style for observation. Two professors from the University of Sevilla came to give an introduction to Flamenco. This workshop has given me great contacts and references for my study of the flamenco guitar.

The main point that I learned is that Flamenco has an oral history which means that the styles have been categorized more by regions and culture than by the musical aspects of each style.

What the group of professors was trying to achieve was a computational method to measure similarities in the melodies of Flamenco singers.

Today was the last day of the workshop, afterwhich we went to the Museu de la Musica where I was able to take notes on the history of the different stringed instruments on display.

Mi Guitarra

So...Tuesday I went around Barcelona visiting guitar stores and found one with a variety of flamenco guitars. It is called Casa Luthier. Albert attended to my needs and helped me choose a guitar. The top two included one from the manufacturer Alhambra, which had great presence, but the tone was not flamenco style. The reason being that flamenco guitars are brighter and this one had more depth like the classical guitars. To me the Alhambra guitar sounded more like an accompaniment guitar. Thus I got the Quiles guitar.