Introduction to Flamenco

welcome to our series on flamenco guitar. as a prerequisite i would highly encourage that you study the basic fingerstyle volume, this is volume 12 which goes over basic finger style technique and you need to have a general knowledge of scales and open chords and barre chords so basically your beginner kind of stuff so if you haven't studied those things you really before you dive into this series you'll want to go back and make sure you have firm grasp on those things. so in this lessons i just want to talk a little bit about what flamenco is. so flamenco is a very specific style that's based out of spain and it highly revolves around the art of flamenco dancing so the guitar's job in flamenco is mainly to accompany the dancers and the instrumentation typically used in flamenco is guitar and hand claps and then you have the dancers so it's kind of minimal as far as instrumentation goes and you can obviously can play flamenco even if there's not somebody there to accompany that's dancing it can be a solo thing too but thats where it originated. so alot of the paterns and songs if you will they revolve around very specific chord progressions and timing and rhythym patterns so flamenco pieces of music are comprised of things called palows so the palows' the musical form is characterized by chord progression, mode and rhythm and they can be related to specific geographical locations within spain as well so within a palow you have, the main thing that the piece of music is based off of is called a compas and the compas is they rhythmic structure and it also can imply a specific chord progression as well `so examples of these would be the malaguena which is a compas they rumba they soleares and the farucca these are all examples there's over 50 different ones we wont study them all but we'll study the basic ones and the most popular ones so within that then you have falsettas which are a little meoldic pieces that are based off of that compas and the chord the established chord progression and this will all make a little more sense when we actually dive into it so this is kind of equivalent to an improvised lick in blues or jazz so in ways flamenco is kind of like jazz you have a structure a chord progression and then you can improvise off of it but it stays within the framework of this chord progression and rhythmic pattern and then you also have what the last part that makes up the palow the whole piece of music is what's called a copla and this is kind of a melody too but it seems like it's more single note almost like a little solo so but it definitely still carries a harmonic chord progression or structure so its very specific it's a very specific style and there's a lot of very specific right hand techniques that are very specific to flamenco that we'll be studying and it's very cool and pretty and complicated style so we're going to take it real slow and just try to build on the basics the other thing i want to talk about is the difference between flamenco and classical as far as the guitar itself so what I'm using here they're essentially the same the guitars are essentially the same there's no fret markings i know that makes it easier when we're teaching to have fret markings but they don't make them with fret markings typically so i'll try to be as clear as i can on where what fret I'm on but basically this is a classical guitar that has a it's basically a pickguard it's like a plastic covering over the body because there's a lot of golpe which is where you tap on the the body of the guitar to create rhythm or emphasize a rhythm or a certain beat in the measure so with classical you typically wouldn't have this with flamenco guitars you'll have this clear plastic plate mine just has it here case i think it was a classical guitar tried to be converted into a flamenco guitar but a lot of times you'll see it'll be all up through here with a flamenco the flamenco is made out of a brighter wood typically becuase it's very it's more treble oriented with flamenco bright sounds real percussive sounding stuff it's not as full and rich as a classical guitar would be and then the body is a little thinner sometimes with a flamenco guitar which would compliment that more that brighter sound and the only other difference with classical you would play like this with flamenco you'd play more like you play rock or blues or a normal kind of guitar so you just put it over your right leg like this you're going to be playing back mnore toward the bridge of the guitar for a brighter sound you get a much brighter sound back here than you you do here which is where we would be strumming or picking with classical right, but back here its a little brighter so you'll see them pick and strum back here more so thats the basic difference so thats kind of our little intro to flamenco and so we're gonna start with lesson one here