Cuban Grooves Course 🇨🇺

New Lesson Updates
1

Hey everyone :wave:

Our new Cuban Grooves Course with Elio Villafranca has been published.

The course offers an introduction to Cuban grooves and rhythms starting with the clave and cascara patterns, montuno patterns, and then exploring other popular Cuban styles such as Mambo, Cha-Cha-Cha, Guajira, and Changüí.

Here’s a link to the course page:

The PDF downloads have been added for most of the lessons and the remaining ones will be uploaded this coming week.

Elio Villafranca

Our Cuban piano teacher is Elio Villafranca - a talented Cuban pianist and educator.

Born in the Pinar del Río province of Cuba, Steinway Artist and Grammy Nominated pianist and composer Elio Villafranca was classically trained in percussion and composition at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba.

Here’s a link to Elio’s website if you’d like to learn more about Elio and his music:

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Thanks so much @Hayden ! I can’t wait to dig in.

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Very nice! Thank you! Any chance he will be doing any seminars? Would be great to put these techniques to use in tunes. Thanks again

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Hey Luzio, yes we did record 5 song performances which I still need to add to the course.

We covered the following 5 tunes:

  • Cuban Descrgas
  • Con Poco Coco
  • La Mulata Rumbera
  • All The Things You Are
  • Decidete

Each of these videos is a performance/demonstration of the tune showing harmony and improvisation using the principles from the course.

I will add these to the course asap and also see if we can host some seminars which dive deeper into the application of the techniques to tunes.

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Hi again. Sorry to bother. Just wondering if there is any news on when the performances will be up? Hoping to get working on it sooner than later. Thanks again.

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Hey @luzioluna :wave:

Apologies for the delay. I have just layered the videos - please see below.

I haven’t added any notation but I can try to map the underlying harmony into a graphic or chord chart above the keyboards. There is an improvisation focus and so I’m not sure how useful transcriptions would be. Please let me know what you think.

We spent most of the recording time working on the cuban groove and rhythm lessons. It would be great to create some Cuban song tutorials with a more detailed breakdown of the harmonies and rhythmic components.

Here are the videos for your perusal:

Descarga Cubana:

Con Poco Coco:

La Mulata Rumbera:

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Wow. That’s amazing.

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Hi there. Are these still available somewhere. Im just checking back in to go through them again

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Hey Luzio :wave:

I located the other 2 performance videos that we recorded - “All The Things You Are” and “Decidete Mi Amor” - here they are.

I will send these to our video editor now and ask him to add the chord changes for all 5 of these performances. Apologies for the delay… this slipped off my radar. I will ensure that they are edited and added to the course page this coming week.