When you pick up acoustic guitar, you want to play songs, right? Maybe to sing some songs around the campfire. Many popular and popular songs sound well accompanied by acoustic guitar, but a sudden desire to play Spanish guitar songs often takes hold of you. If you can play guitar songs in Spanish or instruments that sound in Spanish, it is a mark of your progress as a guitarist. This is a wish that many guitarists have, but not many know how to find suitable music with a Spanish flavor to play.
In order to help these guitarists who want to have a serious guitar piece to play, I will include a few suggestions. I know that many of the songs that we identify as Spanish guitar pieces are quite technically advanced but I will not leave any off my list due to technical difficulty. Any guitar piece you listen to is probably available on the tab and it is up to you to decide once you try playing the tab if you are trying to play something that is too difficult for you.
So when we think of Spanish music, what artists do we think of? There are the Gypsy Kings, Rodrigo and Gabriela, Paco De Lucía. What about José Feliciano? He played Spanish guitar-style arrangements of a couple of Beatles songs.
Or there is Spanish Caravan by The Doors. It was actually a mix of a flamenco guitar style called Granadinas and a classical guitar piece called Asturias by Isaac Albeniz. The guitar playing sounded impressive on the record, but it’s not a huge technical challenge. You can get the general flavor of the intro to Spanish Caravan by playing the B, C, and D bar chords at the second, third, and fifth fret. They all have the same chord shape which is based on the A major chord shape in first position. Here’s the B bar chord in the tab:
e – 2 ——————– |
B – 4 ——————– |
G – 4 ——————– |
D – 4 ——————– |
A – 2 ——————– |
E ———————– |
Now, to give these chords a flamenco touch, remove the measure and put your index finger back on the fifth string and let the first string sound in all three positions.
So now your B chord is:
e – 0 ——————– |
B – 4 ——————– |
G – 4 ——————– |
D – 4 ——————– |
A – 2 ——————– |
E ———————– |
You can also try the same technique by removing the bar from the F major shape and moving it up on the fretboard to see how it sounds.
Some popular Spanish songs that you can search on Google are: Compostelana, La Tarara, Volver, Bomboleiro, Bomoleira, Adelita and La Morena de mi Copla. These are all well known songs that chords, lyrics, and tabs shouldn’t be too hard to find on the web.