WELCOME!

If you’re here, you’re probably raring to get started. Below you’ll find some tips on how to get the most out of the Flamenco Explained site, whatever your current experience with flamenco. We’ll keep this short so you can start playing!

ARE YOU NEW TO FLAMENCO?

If you’re new to flamenco it won’t make much difference (at first) how good a guitar player you are. Because flamenco works a bit differently than most music, even experienced guitarists will want to get a foundation of how flamenco works before tackling the more advanced material on the site.  This is why we developed our Beginner Course. Our Beginner Course is a comprehensive look at everything you need to know to understand and continue learning flamenco – the Compás (rhythms) the techniques, and how we put it all together to create guitar solos or to accompany singers and dancers.

Lessons 1 and 2 (9 videos in total) are for those who haven’t played the guitar before (or not for a while, or not much, or not on a nylon-string guitar). After that it gets interesting for even the most seasoned players.

If you’re at all unsure about what compás is, or how it works, or about the general workings of flamenco, we highly recommend taking the Beginner Course, even if a lot of it is review for you.

IF YOU ALREADY PLAY FLAMENCO

If you’ve been playing for a while, feel like you know what you’re doing, and just want a better understanding or more material, then you’ll find tons of great resources on the Flamenco Explained site. We have Courses on various Palos, tons and tons of falsetas, Courses on accompaniment, Technique, just about everything.

You can Search or Browse for whatever you’re looking for, or you can read this post to get an more in-depth view of all of the material on the site and how to find it. The amount of material on the site can be overwhelming, so we recommend taking a few minutes to read that in order to get the most our of the site.

SOMEWHERE IN-BETWEEN?

A lot of our subscribers are neither complete beginners nor completely comfortable with their understanding of all things flamenco. Though we strongly recommend our Beginner Course for these players too, there are plenty of other resources that might help. We’d recommend you review with out Intro To Compás lesson, and then for many Palos we have stand-alone compás tutorials, which will give you an overview of the given Palo, and from there you can add falsetas to taste. We’d also recommend checking out or How To Use This Site post to get the most out of your experience.

STILL NOT SURE?

If you’re still not quite sure where to start, just email us! We know that everyone’s journey is different, and we’re here to help. We’ll be happy to help you come up with a plan of action that’s just right for you.

WHAT ABOUT TABS?

We also have TABs and standard notation for almost everything on the site over on our free TABs page. However you’ll notice that we don’t provide TABs for everything. There’s a reason for that! The way flamenco works, it can actually be a hindrance to think in terms of the exact notes played. The idea is to understand the concepts of when the harmony changes, how to stay in compás, and how to make all of this interesting and varied. For this reason, videos that address accompaniment or the basic compás of a given palo will sometimes provide on-screen chord diagrams but no TABs. And for the record, those chord diagrams are just what is being played at the moment on-screen. In fact, there is always a multitude of possible chord voicing you could be using instead of what happens to be playing at the moment. It may be uncomfortable for you at first, but we promise it’ll make you a better flamenco player!