Furthering our chord and harmony vocab is one of the most important ways to take our songwriting and musicianship skills to higher levels. In this guitar lesson, I will go over a variety of ideas (many seemingly unrelated) that all aim to make you (and I) better players and songwriters.

Flamenco is a musical style rooted deeply in tradition. Though meant to be played finger style on a Flamenco guitar (similar to classical guitar but with a pronounced midrange), we can adopt practices from the beautiful realm of Flamenco and apply them on whatever guitar we happen to have on hand. Flamenco purists would certainly frown on that idea, but if you have gone over enough of my lessons, you probably know my stance on purists...

I continuously seek to blend Flamenco ideas into my steel string acoustic playing. To that end, I bought a book several years ago titled Flamenco Guitar Method Volume 1.

Some aspects of Flamenco style don't translate well to acoustic guitar, but we can certainly borrow basic chord strumming ideas.

Flamenco chord strumming typically relies on a technique called Rasgueo. This technique has you balling up your strumming hand into a fist and explosively releasing various combinations of fingers to create the firey, percussive character associated with Flamenco guitar. One way to mimic this idea (albeit, doesn't sound as compelling as it does when played true Flamenco style) is to simply make rapid strums. Consider the chord progression below:

This chord progression/strumming pattern is known as a Solea. The key here is to execute the 16th note strums rapidly which gives the progression excellent rhythmic energy and passion.

Enjoy!

-Brian