Transcript
Hi, I’m Dan Garcia and I’m going to show you this technique called rasgueardo or rasqueos. This is a very unique and very characteristic technique on flamenco guitar.The technique consists of pretty much shooting your fingers up from your thumb, sort of in an aggressive way to hit the strings with a lot of power. It’s a very measured technique in the way you have to fit your fingers shooting out very precisely in time.
There are several different types of rasgueardo’s. The first thing we have to master though, is our index finger. The index finger is very important in flamenco guitar. It’s usually going to keep the beat most of the time for whatever you’re doing. So your index is going to shoot up from your thumb sort of like you’re trying to flick something off the table. Okay, and it’s also going to come back most of the time and strike the strings, so sort of like this. Put a chord to that.
Okay, so next would be our two finger rasgueardo and that would be our middle finger and our index. So our beginning position should be thumb, kind of bent holding these two fingers. The first finger to come out is going to be the middle and then index and then the index will come back. It looks like this. So there are three strikes to this finger, one, two, and three, index coming back.
The next rasgueardo is our three finger rasgueardo, and this one consists on annular, middle finger and index finger. There will be four strikes of the strings, since the index will always do two. So it will be one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four. Our next rasgueardo will be our four finger rasgueardo. This is one of the few times our pinkie plays the strings.
The way we do this is we’ve got to hold all the fingers now, including our pinkie and that’s going to be the first one to come out, pinkie, annular finger, middle, index and index back. So we have five strikes to the strings. One, two, three, four, five; one, two, three, four, five; one, two, three, four, five. So have fun playing your rasgueardos.
