Why We Start with Compás

Most musicians arrive at flamenco with the wrong question. They want to know what to play. This is about a different question: how flamenco actually works, why compás is the foundation of everything, and how I teach it. If you’ve ever felt like you were on the outside of the music looking in — even after years of study — this is for you.

How I Got Here

There’s a huge difference between playing flamenco and playing stuff that sounds like flamenco. I know this because when I took my first few lessons with a real flamenco teacher (Dennis Koster, approximately one million years ago) I realized that I had had no idea what flamenco actually was. I just liked how it sounded. To this day it feels like a miracle that I fell in love with what flamenco really is, because what I was doing before was so far from it. Dennis prepared me for my move to Spain and for studying with players like Juan Fernandez, Miguel-Angel Cortés and Enrique Melchor – and later with Viejín and David Cerreduela.

It’s a lot easier today to learn about what flamenco actually is, but it’s still not so easy to really understand it. How it works, how you have so much freedom within what feels at first like a very restrictive rhythmic situation, and how flamenco musicians and dancers communicate. To understand this you need a lot more than a nylon-string guitar and some TABs. But you absolutely can learn it, and you don’t have to come live in Spain or spend a year in a cave in Sacromonte (though that’s a LOT of fun and doesn’t hurt). What you need is someone who gets that you don’t have that understanding yet.

None of my teachers ever laid out for me “this is how flamenco works,” but it was built into everything that I was taught. This is what we try to bring to Flamenco Explained – an experience like the one I had that prepared me to make a life and living out of playing flamenco guitar.

But it’s a little different, because after learning to play flamenco I also went and got a degree from the Berklee College of Music, which taught me how to talk about music – specifically flamenco – in a way that seems to really resonate with students. I feel incredibly lucky to have had both of those experiences, and to have had them in that order – first almost 10 years of flamenco, then a formal education in jazz. Because I’m not so sure that I would have approached flamenco the same way if I had had the formal education first.

The Problem I Kept Seeing

For most of my teaching career, private students came to me the same way. They’d been studying flamenco for a while — sometimes a long while — and something wasn’t clicking. They could play. In many cases they could play beautifully. But it never felt like they were actually playing flamenco.

Some had studied in Spain. Some were professional musicians in other styles. Some had spent years on YouTube and online courses, building repertoire, learning techniques, accumulating material. And still — something was missing.

What was missing, almost without exception, was actually feeling the compás.

Not the concept. Most of them knew what compás was intellectually. And some of them could count it all perfectly. What was missing was the felt sense of it — the ability to inhabit the rhythm rather than calculate it. To live it and breathe it. And to get it right, because there are tons of students who don’t count or analyze, but also don’t get the compás right.

This is the specific thing most flamenco instruction doesn’t teach. Not because teachers don’t value it — they do — but because it’s genuinely hard to teach, and because it’s much easier to build a curriculum around material than around something as hard to pin down as feeling.

So students learn the material. They get good at the material. And they still don’t quite get flamenco.

That gap is why Flamenco Explained exists. One of my students — a player with a DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts, the PhD of music) and years of flamenco study including time in Spain — told me I needed to publish my method because working together was the first time it finally clicked for him. If it could take that long for someone with that background, it could happen to anyone. And it does.

What Compás Actually Is

Some things in flamenco, like Duende or soniquete, are ineffable. There’s just no way to truly define what they are or who has them. Compás – the time element of flamenco – is much more absolute. You’re either in compás or you’re not. It’s not a philosophical discussion.

Compás can seem really hard at first, but what it really is is unfamiliar. You probably didn’t grow up hearing Bulerías and Fandangos on the radio, so these rhythms are not built into you the way lots of 4/4 and 3/4 time are. Even professional players are often thrown by compás because it’s just foreign. Until it’s not.

Music doesn’t work when the time is off. When you hear this happen in music you know, there’s no analysis or counting – it just feels wrong because it is wrong. Flamenco is exactly the same. Once you know how the compás is supposed to be, you just feel it when it’s wrong. But since it’s mostly new, you have to actually work at learning it.

The goal of everything I teach is to get you to where you feel it. Not where you understand it intellectually, not where you can count through it accurately — where you inhabit it. Where it stops being something you think about and becomes something you just feel. One of my mantras is this: Counting is just a tool we use to learn to feel.

How I Actually Teach It

In private lessons and in our Introduction to Flamenco course I start teaching compás, technique, and how it all comes together on day one. Many years ago I developed a way to bring together compás, technique and context in a way that just requires being able to play a few chords. If you spend some time with that very first lesson, you start to have a real understanding of the most important concepts in flamenco, and the compás is what holds it all together.

In practice, that means we count a lot, especially early on. Your left brain needs to understand how the compás works before your body can feel it — needs to map the structure, identify the landmarks, understand why the rhythm does what it does.

I’ll say it again: counting is just a tool we use to learn to feel the compás.

The goal is to feel it. And getting from counting to feeling requires a specific set of tools I’ve been developing and refining over decades of private teaching. Little tricks, specific exercises, ways of directing your attention that gradually shift the experience from counting to feeling. It’s not magic or even Duende — it requires practice — but it works consistently, which is how I know this is teachable.

The other thing I’m always doing is teaching context. Every technique, every falseta, every exercise lives somewhere in flamenco — in specific palos, specific moments, specific relationships between guitar, cante, and baile. I explain that context as we go. A guitarist who understands where the material comes from plays it differently than one who’s just learned the notes. Which is also why I constantly stress listening to flamenco. The more you listen the more informed a player you’ll be – and it comes through in your playing.

There’s a real difference between sounding like flamenco and actually playing flamenco. There’s nothing wrong with borrowing the sound of flamenco, or the techniques, for other styles of music. But that’s not what I teach.