Weekly Newsletter #30

March 3, 2022

There is perhaps no other music so closely associated with guitar than flamenco. 

This rhythmic Spanish style of music is iconic and instantly recognizable to anyone who’s heard it before. From the powerful and dramatic strumming patterns to the blazing fast scales and modes, flamenco is a genre of music that requires a serious level of dedication to master. 

But if you’re interested in the basic and most fundamental of flamenco techniques, or simply looking for a way to improve your fingerpicking, flamenco strumming technique will work wonders for your mechanics. 

Rasqueado is the technique used by flamenco guitarists to strum chords using each finger of the picking hand as an individual unit. 

Instead of strumming once through the string with a pick, your thumb, or index finger, rasqueado uses each finger as an individual unit of attack. 

For examples of rasqueados and how to play them, please check out this VIDEO and the TAB. 

Away from the guitar, draw all your fingers into the palm of your picking hand, with the thumb on the outside (not inside the fist). 

Don’t clench your fist, but rather keep the fingers curled in loosely, and use your thumb to cover the pinky nail. 

From here, try quickly shooting out only your pinky finger using its big knuckle as the main source of power. 

It will meet the resistance of your thumb, but keep pushing it until it flies out past the thumb. This speed and power is what you are looking for. 

See if you can’t get it to fully extend and not stop part of the way outward. 

Keep in mind the feeling inside your hand as the pressure builds against your thumb and when it finally breaks through and fully extends. 

Most likely your ring and maybe your middle finger came flying out with it, no need to worry, this is normal in the beginning. 

After your pinky is fully extended, bring your other fingers back into a loose fist if they came out during the pinky extension. 

Then cover your ring finger with your thumb and shoot out it out as hard as you can. Again, bring back any fingers that come out as a result of the ring finger extending. 

Do the same process for the middle and index fingers. 

What you are looking for when doing this is a very sharp and quick explosion from the big knuckle and middle knuckle. 

That snapping feeling that you get is what should occur when you eventually remove the thumb and work on the rasqueados on their own. 

Besides the obvious benefit of learning to play rasqueados, this exercise builds fast twitch muscle fiber in these knuckles. This fiber is not only good for the extension of your fingers, but also for the flexion of your fingers. 

When you fingerpick you are using flexion in your fingers to bring the fingertip through the string toward your palm. That motion stems mainly from your big and middle knuckles. So naturally, the more fast twitch muscle fiber you have around those joints, the more power and speed you’ll generate when fingerpicking. 

This means that even if you aren’t interested in mastering flamenco music, practicing rasqueados is one of the best ways to improve general finger style ability. 

Not only is the fast twitch fiber increased during this, but tendon flexibility is as well. 

This flexibility, or the lack thereof, is why your other fingers come flying out when you try to just use your pinky or ring finger during rasqueados. 

By practicing rasqueado technique you are forcing one finger to come out while trying to maintain the inward position of all the others. This creates a stretch in the tendons of your hands and leads to greater flexibility and relaxation in your picking hand and fingers. 

Other than the mechanical benefits from practicing rasqueado, it is an incredible way to supplement your playing by using very large and powerful strumming. 

The most notable factor is the “machine gun” sound of a good rasqueado. 

This is where you can hear each finger strike through the strings independently, creating 4 or 5 rapid chord bursts. 

To practice this on the guitar, take your thumb and rest it on the corner of the fret board nearest the sound hole (be careful not to dampen the top of the guitar by touching its face). 

Deaden the strings with your left hand and shoot out your pinky. This time we aren’t using the thumb to build up pressure, we have to generate that power naturally through the snapping of our big and middle knuckles. 

Try to quickly drag the back of pinky nail through as many of the 6 strings as possible. When doing so, leave all other fingers balled up in the loose fist. 

Do the same for the ring, middle and index fingers. 

Ideally these strums would be in time, so using a metronome is mandatory for this exercise. 

There are innumerable patterns of rasqueados that exist, and in the VIDEO you’ll learn several of the most common. 

These rasqueados use a variety of finger combinations, all of which require the ability to quickly shoot out a finger and drag it swiftly through the strings. 

Whether or not you are deeply motivated to play flamenco should not be the determining factor in whether or not you attempt this technique. 

If you are a fingerpicker of any kind, I guarantee this will massively benefit your technique. 

Stick with it and you’ll soon see massive improvement in the power, dexterity and ability to relax your picking hand. 

-Max Rich