Our hotel has a couple of surprisingly talented guys doing traditional Bouzouki music. One is doing some great runs and double-stops on what is, in effect, a neck the width of a broom handle. What I’m utterly baffled by is the time sigs of some of the songs. I was trying to follow them, and it’s impossible! They must be jumping time signatures every few bars!
Does anyone have any info on this ?
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Check out Bulgarian wedding music, particularly modern stuff by Ivo Papasov and his crazy bunch. It really is mind-blowing as they DO change metre, often every bar. Daft. We are children by comparison.
Bonkers.
I started off on bouzouki before switching to guitar but I played on the Greek function seen for many years and got to
recognise them more by feel and ear rather than knowing the theory behind it but The Greeks are also very good at mixing time signatures, styles and knowing their relative keys and moving to other songs mid flight. The lead or signal for this comes from the singer or bouzouki player and they're basically reading the crowd and wanting the dance floor to remain packed.
One of the great things about bouzouki playing is it's alternate picking and it's such a discipline and with double strings, too - some are in unison and some are in octaves - same principal as a mandolin. Do that for a while and then switch to guitar and you can do all that Paul Gilbert and Al di Meola stuff, if you so wish.
As an aside, I have 2 cousins in Cyprus who are considered to be 2 of the best bouzouki players in the world and have played with many top artists. One of them in particular, and my late uncle, played on the Cat Steven's track 'Ruby Love' from his Teaser & the Firecat album and toured with him and the latter was on Barry Blue's 'Dancing on a Saturday night'