Searching Content on Flamenco Explained

We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to find what you’re looking for on the Flamenco Explained site, despite the massive number of videos we have available. One of the ways we do that is by using filters on our Search function. But we know that if you don’t know what those filter terms mean, it’s not going to be so helpful. So here’s a breakdown of what those terms mean so you can get the most out of our site:

Palos

A Palo is a style of flamenco. Each Palo has a mood, a tempo range and a key it’s traditionally played in. One of the best things about flamenco is learning the various Palos so you can express different aspects of yourself. If you’re new, you’ll first be learning a Palo called Soleá (or Soleares) which is often referred to as the mother of flamenco.

So if you’re learning Soleá and you want to see some of the other lessons we have for Soleá on the site, you could select the Soleá filter to make sure you don’t see the hundreds of videos we have about other Palos (which might not make sense to you just yet).

As you learn more Palos, you may want to restrict your searches to material or courses that cover other Palos, and you’d use the other specific Palo filters to do that.

The Palos you can currently filter for include Soleá, Soleá Por Bulerías, Bulerías, Alegrías, Tangos, Tientos, Seguirilla, Fandangos de Huelva, Guajirs, Tarantas, Tarantos, Sevillanas, Campanilleros and Tanguillos.

Playing Level

Each lesson has a tag that designates it as either a Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced level lesson, so that you can search for material that suits your current playing level. Some lessons are tagged as both Beginner and Intermediate or Intermediate and Advanced. These filters are the least objective, though, because something that might be very easy for an experienced guitarist who’s new to flamenco might seem very advanced to someone who’s new to the guitar.

Also, some lessons feature material that is technically not so hard to play, but very rhythmically challenging. A lesson may also contain material that’s relatively easy to play but not the sort of thing you need to learn in your first year of playing flamenco. So while the playing levels are a helpful guide, take them with a grain of salt, and don’t be too surprised if you disagree with our assessment of the difficulty level of a given lesson.

Technique

This is a relatively straightforward category or filters. If you’re looking for material that predominantly features a specific technique, then select that filter to only see material that features that technique. Most material features a combination of techniques, so there will be some overlap, but for the most part the filters will lead you to what you’re looking for.

If you’re not clear on what the specific technique names refer to, then you probably haven’t finished our Beginner Course just yet. In that case you can click on these technique names to learn more: Alzapua, Thumb, Arpeggio, Picado, Rasgueado, Slur, Left Hand.

Using the Filters

This all means that you can make your searches very specific when looking for lessons. For example, you could search for “Falseta” and use the Soleá, Beginner and Picado filters to only see easy Picado falsetas por Soleá. Or you could search for “Compas” and use the Bulerías and Advanced filters to get lessons on advanced Bulerías compás.

If some of these words still don’t mean anything to you, don’t worry. It will all make sense as you make more progress in the Beginner Course!