Learning Flamenco Guitar

Today, I started flamenco guitar lessons.

I have been playing the guitar now for 30 years, mostly badly, completely self-taught. I started out with a borrowed Telecaster copy at school, playing along to Clapton, JJ Cale, the Stones, the Clash, etc etc. I have always concentrated on steel-string acoustics, my first guitar being a Yamaha FG-340 (the best cheap guitar ever made), then getting an Aria (after an unkind person – thanks, Ma – chucked the Yam out of the window), and finally ending up with a Martin 000-16R (their nearly-cheapest model, but a very nice parlour guitar and still pretty damn expensive). I also have an Epiphone electric semi-acoustic which is great fun. A lot of what I play uses open-tunings, both played finger-style and with a bottleneck. Guiding lights include Ry Cooder, Rev Gary Davies, John Fahey, Johnny Winter, Duane Allman, Chris Foster and others.

But I’ve never had a nylon-strung guitar before. I had tried them of course, but always found them too wide in the neck, often high of action and just not really my thing.

But I have always loved flamenco. Studying Spanish at degree level, I did my ‘year out’ in Jerez de la Frontera, which many people consider the heartland of flamenco. Many nights I went out to flamenco dives to listen to guitarists and singers; sometimes there were even knife fights outside; and certainly much drinking of fino (which no doubt contributed to the fighting). Singing was perhaps more important than the guitar and a chance to show duende, a term that can be sort of conveyed by the word ’soul’, but also includes an element of harsh, enduring, survival in the face of a largely hostile world. Even when I was there, in 1981, flamenco was seen as something old-fashioned, working-class (or rural) and to be shunned; I even saw signs saying “se prohibe el cante” in bars in Sevilla, to discourage drunken old boys from getting too loud. At school and when I returned from my year out at university I listened to a lot of flamenco – Paco Pe?±a and Paco de Lucia principally, probably because they were the most popular in England or the world more generally.

Recently a shop called The Latin Quarter opened just up the road from us. It sells flamenco guitars and costumes, and also hosts classes in both dance and guitar-playing. Since Daughter Number 1 had expressed a desire to do both, I took her up there last weekend and bought us both ‘Spanish’ guiatrs, hers a little Valencia model, mine an Esteve 1.4STE with laminated Mongoy (also called ‘Ovankol’) back & sides and a rosewood fingerboard. It was ¬£160 but plays and sounds like a much more costly instrument. At the same time as I bought it, I booked a lesson for the following Wednesday (today).

My lesson this evening was with Javier, a young fellow from Barcelona who lived in Sevilla for 8 years (and who sounds much more Andalucian than Catalan) and whose novia is a Sevillana. They have been in England for 8 months. One of the nice things was that we did the entire lesson in Spanish. I had been anxious beforehand about having to do a “so what can you play” exercises, since the truth is that I really cannot play anything complete at all; I can noodle around a lot, but I don’t really have any ’songs’ as such. However, we got through that and then started on a gentle Sevillanas:

E- | B7 | E- | E7 | A- | D7 | G | C | B9 | B7 | E-

but trying to do the rasgueo – the distinctive flamenco strumming of the strings with successive nails – demanded both attention and flexibility, which involved a kind of ‘concentrate, but not too hard’ mental attitude. Practice will help. Oh, there are different sorts of rasgueo, too… We moved on to a Solea after that, and I learned the correct use of the thumb (which should be used positively to ‘press’ on the lower string after hitting the upper one), as well as how to do arpeggios.

This is brilliant stuff. It is extremely demanding, but I have learned more in this last hour than in the last 15 years of just a*sing about. Javier is terrifyingly talented, so I’d better get off to practise so that I don’t feel too undeserving when I see him next.

Oh, and finally, at ¬£25 per hour it’s terrific value.

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