picado

Everyone wants to play fast. But speed sounds rubbish if the pulsation of the music is not there. Playing fast might impress those who do not know, but if you wish to play flamenco, forget speed. Concentrate instead on control and accuracy. Compás is everything and it is adherence to compás (like a train on a track) that gives pulsation to the music and pulsation is far more important than speed. All you do by playing slower is that you make people tap their feet slower! The exhilaration is no different. One last thing – everyone has limits. Learn yours and enjoy them.Whilst you practice scales, concentrate on:

• weight exchange between left hand fingers
• moving your right arm to avoid bending your wrist.

starting off – string walking

Practice first planting only one finger on all strings from the bass to the treble and back again. Practise using “a”, “m” and “i”, but each one alone. If you find the left hand chords difficult for you at the present time. use simpler chords, or even open strings. After that move on to use other fingers.

• keeping your wrist straight, and move your whole arm up and down to accommodate the relative heights of the strings. When you are playing on the bass strings, your wrist will be at the top edge of the guitar.

When you are comfortable with planting one string, let’s start using two strings.

• Remember place – press – release?
• As you press, the next finger should be placing.

Practise these variants:

a-a-a-a-a
m-m-m-m-m
i-i-i-i-i
a-m-a-m-a
m-a-m-a-m
a-i-a-i-a
i-a-i-a-i
i-m-i-m-i
m-i-m-i-m

Download the tablature file for string crossing.

Before you can play picado fast, you need to enable the right hand to play a sequence of notes on one string.

Download the tablature file for picado on one string (speed bursts).

Do the above exercise on all six strings, starting from the bass, moving to the treble.

Download the tablature file for chromatic scales.

This exercise involves string crossing – make sure that you do not repeat any fingers.

speed bursts

Speed bursts are exactly what they sound like – a series of notes played in rapid succession.

Start on the second string and play five notes i-m-i-m-i, rest and repeat. Play them as fast as you can trying to make the five notes more of a continuous movement as opposed to five individual movements. Keep everything even: tone, volume and rhythm. Practise on all strings using the above right hand finger combinations.

Download the tablature file for picado speed bursts.
You can also apply speed bursts to the second chromatic scales exercise very easily.

staccato practice

Practice all scales staccato as well as the more usual non-staccato way. When you practise staccato, the scale should sound slow, but the movement (that is, the planting) should be as fast as you can properly make it.