Level Up Your Strumming Technique with Spanish Guitar Exercises

Edina Balczo is an UK based guitarist who hosts a popular YouTube channel, The Spanish Guitar Hub, with 9 million views and 37,000 subscribers. And, very importantly, she's soon coming out with a book (and video series) on Spanish Guitar Strumming Techniques.

With a long background playing Spanish-style guitar in her group, De Fuego, and stellar teaching career beginning with her YouTube channel in 2006, Edina is ideally place to teach someone the Spanish strumming ropes.

What is Spanish Guitar Strumming?

Her Spanish Guitar Strumming Techniques material focuses on the right hand - on how to achieve that famous Spanish sound through fast, percussive, and grooving strumming.

For those not familiar, Spanish guitar strumming include things like (and these are all covered in the book):

• Basic rumba technique
• Rumba technique variations
• Pulgar
• Flamenco triplet
• Adding the hit to the flamenco triplet
• Golpe strumming
• Rasgueado
• Muted rasgueado
• Rasgueado variations
• Hammer-on and Pull-off
• Tango with rasgueado
• Alzapua as a strumming technique
• Drumming techniques

While these strumming techniques are the main aim of the material, Edina covers a number of other topics to get there:

• How to read Tab
• Rythym reading
• Chord composition
• CAGED System

So, regardless of your starting point, this teaching material will give you an on-ramp to learning the Spanish style.

Why is it Important?

I think this material is important for several reasons:

Because so much of guitar technique focuses on the fretting hand - scales, chord shapes, speed exercises.

And even fingerpicking exercises often become a dual-handed exercise in smooth chord transitions, rather than a strict picking exercise.  It's rare to find such an extensive resource that focuses just on right-hand strumming.

Because Edina presents clear, helpful information on percussive use of the guitar body.

Acoustic fingerstyle guitar makes great use of drum beat-like hitting and slapping of the guitar body.  But it's difficult to figure out how to start achieving that technique for yourself.  Edina presents some helpful introduction on this topic.

Because Edina herself is obviously in love with music.

One of the great gifts that any teacher gives to the student is a passion for the subject. Guitar lessons are no exception.  Edina's warmth and enthusiasm are infectious.

Where To Get It

The Spanish Guitar Strumming Technique material is comprised of three sections:

a) an eBook

b) real book

c) a video series (under development).

The easiest way to get access is to go to Edina's Kickstarter page and donate £14. This will get you early access to the eBook.  In addition, you'll be funding her way towards production of the video lessons.

If you're looking to just get a sense of this Spanish Guitar stuff, you can check out her YouTube channel for some quick lessons.

https://youtu.be/6UjUM0rjI_o