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    Spanish Guitar Strumming Techniques
    Spanish Guitar Strumming Techniques
    Spanish Guitar Strumming Techniques
    Ebook132 pages1 hour

    Spanish Guitar Strumming Techniques

    By Edina Balczo

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    About this ebook

    Have you ever wanted to learn the secrets of playing Spanish style guitar? Do you have the urge to play the guitar in a fast, rhythmic, and percussive way that excites and ignites an audience? Have you ever wanted to master the rumba, the flamenco triplet or the rasgueado? In Spanish Guitar Strumming Techniques, guitarist and YouTube phenomenon Edina Balczo teaches and demonstrates a wide array of 21st century strumming methods tailored for the Spanish guitar.

    Included are over 150 lessons, exercises, and illustrations, each will clear and precise instructions that include:
    •Chords and how to construct, and use them
    •Dozens of different strumming and other techniques
    •Exercises to help you to build up to the right speed

    The exercises are presented in traditional musical notation, TAB, and with chord diagrams. If you are an emerging guitarist or just a beginner who is eager to master the Spanish guitar, this book is for you.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEdina Balczo
    Release dateJul 11, 2018
    ISBN9780463250129
    Spanish Guitar Strumming Techniques
    Author

    Edina Balczo

    Edina Balczo is a UK-based professional guitarist, who has been playing more than 18 years. She is endorsed by GuitarPro software, and hosts a popular YouTube channel, The Spanish Guitar Hub, which has received millions of views and attracted tens of thousands of subscribers. With her Spanish guitar duo, De fuego, she has recorded and released two albums and performed throughout Europe, including appearances at the Glastonbury festival (UK), Sziget fesztival (HU), Meadows in the Mountains (BG), and Vegfest (UK). She has also performed in special events for Google, Green Peace, and the Commonwealth Nations Ceremony awards.

    Read more from Edina Balczo

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    • 1/5
      the poorest wannabe flamenco method on earth - it's a pity : a so big chance to put in contact beginners with this style of music in the wrong hands - I don't know if this person real exists but for sure she picke up some confused material from Internet and create a bad minestrone here - not serious.

    Book preview

    Spanish Guitar Strumming Techniques - Edina Balczo

    Preface

    I play the rhythm guitar and have accompanied people in different bands, using Spanish guitar strumming techniques, for more than 18 years. In addition, I have been uploading guitar lessons to my YouTube channel since 2006, focusing mainly on right-hand guitar techniques. Many people have been encouraged and inspired by these videos. I have received numerous heart-warming comments from people who attributed improvements in their guitar playing to them. I live in the UK, but my YouTube audience is international, and includes people from every continent (perhaps except for Antarctica). This book is written for them and for all the people who would like to improve their strumming techniques on the guitar.

    The widespread support and encouragement that I have received from all over the world provided the inspiration for me to write this book. Many instruction books have been written for the flamenco guitar, and others have been written that cover strumming techniques on the steel-string guitar, but nothing quite like this book has appeared before. Many different Spanish guitar strumming techniques are illustrated and I am confident that the material presented throughout the following pages, and the teaching methods that I utilize to explain them, will provide a sound basis for guitarists to improve their playing, especially in terms of providing rhythmic support. Each lesson contains step-by-step explanations and many exercises to enable students to perfect their strumming techniques.

    The TABs shown in this book are also available in GuitarPro format from my website at https://thespanishguitarhub.com/. This software is a tablature editor program for guitar, bass, and other fretted instruments. It is equipped with a powerful audio engine, which makes learning music easier. It also contains a feature that allows the user to slow the music down or practice with a loop trainer (which can repeat the TAB, or just a particular section of the TAB, and optionally accelerate the tempo of the music with each iteration of the loop). A trial version is available at https://www.guitar-pro.com/en/index.php

    This is my first book and, in fact, I have never worked so hard on anything as I have on this particular project. Although some of the techniques are relatively easy to demonstrate on video, there is a considerable challenge in describing them in written text. This challenge is further complicated by the fact that English is my second language. Fortunately, I was able to obtain two of my YouTube subscribers to help, both of whom are guitarists and fluent in English. They volunteered to proof-read and correct any technical or linguistic errors in my manuscript as I was producing each chapter. I am extremely grateful for their invaluable assistance. Without it I would not have been able to produce this book. – Edina Balczo

    Introduction

    This book contains 19 different lessons with over 150 exercises and illustrations. It is recommended that the guitarist learn the material in the order in which it is presented, as some techniques use or include previously described materials.

    Many of the strumming techniques and patterns found herein are of my own invention, but some are derived from the traditional flamenco style. Also, most of the exercises are taken from my original compositions or from my guitar duo, De fuego. I share this knowledge with the hope that you can use it later on to compose your own music. My goal with this book is to describe and demonstrate new or little-known methods of playing vibrant Spanish-style guitar rhythms that can also be used in other types of music. Many of these techniques exploit percussive characteristics of the guitar which provides a whole new concept for playing that instrument.

    In this book you will learn:

    Chords and how to construct them

    Different strumming techniques

    Exercises to get to the right speed

    I have also included a little quiz at the end of each music theory lesson to test your newly found knowledge. Also, this book is suitable for both right-handed and left-handed guitar players.

    Always practice with a metronome and never increase the speed until you are sure and confident with your technique. Play slowly and deliberately until you perfect the movements. This will help you to reach the right speed later on.

    I also want to emphasize that this is not a flamenco book nor do I intend to teach flamenco guitar. Most flamenco styles are in rhythmic units of twelve beats with accents in different places within that rhythmic framework. On the other hand, I do demonstrate many strumming styles using flamenco techniques. The intent is to teach you how to accompany people with those techniques incorporated into other, non-flamenco, rhythms. The exception is when the flamenco Farruca rhythm is used as an example to teach the rasgueado technique. In this case the Farruca is an eight-beat framework, not twelve. If you intend to learn flamenco guitar, then this is not the book for you. There are many other wonderful books with lots of exercises that you can read to learn flamenco.

    You can use all the included strumming styles to play Spanish guitar, mainly using rumba rhythms in addition to the many other rhythms that are described in this book. For Spanish guitar the soloist can use a plectrum (pick), which is unlike flamenco where players use only their fingers. Spanish guitar also involves a lot of improvisation and in that respect it is somewhat similar to jazz. But instead of using many different chords, most are major, minor, dominant 7th, minor 7th, and major 7th.

    I hope you enjoy the journey and have fun using these techniques when playing music with other people.

    1. How to Read TAB and Traditional Music Notation

    1.1. How to Read TAB

    TAB is an abbreviation for tablature. It is a way to notate a musical piece using the guitar fretboard as reference rather than the musical notation. TAB is written with six

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