Welcome to one of the most active flamenco sites on the Internet. Guests can read most posts but if you want to participate click here to register.
This site is dedicated to the memory of Paco de Lucía, Ron Mitchell, Guy Williams, Linda Elvira, Philip John Lee, Craig Eros, Ben Woods, David Serva and Tom Blackshear who went ahead of us.
We receive 12,200 visitors a month from 200 countries and 1.7 million page impressions a year. To advertise on this site please contact us.
I’ve updated the guitar exercises on my website. I’ve deleted some of the older stuff to add 34 new exercises that apply different right-hand techniques and patterns to a single diatonic chord progression.
I’ve been playing these new exercises for about a month, and they seem to be making my hands stronger.
I developed the material from my most recent warm-up exercise, but it all goes back to a very basic idea in thirds that Ramón Montoya and others played a lot. Extending that idea up and down the neck, I worked out 13 chords, from E minor in first position to C major where the neck joins the body. Thirteen is an odd number that works well for forming a loop with 12 chords up and 12 down.
The six techniques applied to this progression are (1) arpeggios, (2) horquilla, (3) thumb and index, (4) thumb and index + single-note lines, (5) single-note lines and (6) tremolo. I’ve worked out ascending and descending patterns in triplets, sixteenths and other time values, trying to cover all the possible variations that are useful.
The result is a lot of new material, some of which will probably be too easy or too hard, and some that should be juuuust right for you.
Thanks to all. This morning I changed the order of some of the patterns on the web page. Last night, it occurred to me that it’s harder (for me, at least) to start with index than with ring finger, especially in some of the final patterns, and what I want is to show the easier exercises before the harder ones. So, I had to edit the images of the summaries of some of the techniques, but the patterns themselves remain unchanged.
Diatonic chords are such a basic concept that I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has already published something similar to my study. The patterns associated with thumb and index and with thumb/index + single notes are more closely related to flamenco guitar and may be more interesting if you don’t care for the others.
RE: 34 exercises with diatonic chords (in reply to Stu)
Hi Stu,
The main thing is to memorize the chord progression. It’s not hard, because all the chords are basic, although it took me a while to remember that two of them skip a string. Once you’ve got the progression memorized, you can focus on the application of right-hand techniques and patterns, and the scores aren’t even necessary, which is what I like the most about the study. I’ll know exactly where to go and what to do, and it’s just a question of getting my fingers to cooperate.
I’m posting about this study again because, after adding new material, it now features 43 exercises based on 28 striking-hand patterns. I’ve also added new texts and edited the existing texts to make them clearer, and I’ve numbered the patterns in the summaries and in the scores to make them easier to find.
Bumping this yet again, not to keep it afloat but because I’ve added yet another twist: the same diatonic chords can be played in E major. By "same" I mean that the inversions consist of tonic-fifth-tonic-third, low to high, just like the chords in C. It’s fun to play in E major, because it covers two full octaves and also because the chords in the first seven measures are fingered differently from those in C major. I reckon the thing to do now is to work out analogous chords in a few more keys, but I’ve been banging away on this for a few months now, like a Roomba stuck in a corner, and it’s time to move on. But there’s plenty to develop here. I’ve only applied the first simple arpeggio pattern.
Here’s the link again. The chords in E are at the bottom of the page, after the tremolo.
Printable Version
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread