When you take up the acoustic guitar you want to play songs, right? Maybe to sing some songs around the campfire. Lots of pop songs and folk songs sound good accompanied by the acoustic guitar but a sudden wish to play Spanish guitar songs often takes hold of you. If you can play Spanish guitar songs or Spanish sounding instrumentals it is a mark of your progress as a guitar player. This is a wish that many guitarists have but not too many know how to go about finding suitable Spanish flavored music to play.
In order to be some help to these guitarists who wish to have a serious guitar piece to play, I will throw in some suggestions. I know that many of the songs we identify as Spanish guitar pieces are fairly advanced technically but I am not going to leave any out of my list on the basis of technical difficulty. Any guitar piece you hear is probably available on tab and it is up to you to decide once you attempt to play the tab whether you are trying to play something that is too hard for you.
So when we think Spanish music what artists do we think of? There is The Gypsy Kings, Rodrigo Y Gabriela, Paco De Lucia. How about Jose Feliciano. He played Spanish guitar style arrangements of a couple of Beatles songs.
Or there is Spanish Caravan by The Doors. This was actually a mixture 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 is not a great 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 frets. They are all the same chord shape which is based on the A major chord shape in the first position. Here is the B bar chord in tab:
e--2--------------------|
B--4--------------------|
G--4--------------------|
D--4--------------------|
A--2--------------------|
E-----------------------|
Now to get the Flamenco flavor into these chords, take the bar off and put your first finger back on the fifth string and let the first string ring open 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 the fretboard to see how it sounds.
Some popular Spanish songs you could 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 should not be too hard to find on the web.
