Rasgueo

The prominent rhythm is ♩♫♩, with the first note receiving stress through an agogic or dynamic accent, by being arpeggiated rapidly, or with an upward movement of the rasgueo.

There’s no denying that flamenco guitar with its machine-gun speed picking riffs and dizzying helicopter-like ‘rasgueo’ hand strums is physically punishing.

His technique on the instrument mainly consists of medium-tempo strums and is somewhat rudimentary—compared to the virtuosic rasgueos of Los Sumac Huaynas’ Chocni López (briefly discussed in Chapter 3)

There are several factors that contribute to the variety of options open to the guitar player when dealing with rasgueo. If a chord is held down by the left hand, the attack will sound differently depending on whether the fingers on the right hand thrust down, aided by gravity and the extension of the fingers, or are drawn up across the strings in a gripping action.

On a larger structural level, there are semi-independent musical units or blocks, which, when placed within a compás and assembled, create a piece. These components include rasgueos (here I refer to the structural unit, which is comprised of the technique mentioned above), falsetas, llamadas (Eng. call), cierres and remates.