When you pick up the acoustic guitar you want to play songs, right? Maybe to sing some songs around the campfire. Many pop songs and folk songs sound good accompanied by acoustic guitar, but often you get a sudden desire to play Spanish guitar songs. If you can play Spanish guitar songs or instrumentals that sound in Spanish, it’s a sign of your progress as a guitarist. This is a desire that many guitarists have, but not many know how to find suitable Spanish flavored music to play.
In order to be of any help to these guitarists who want to have a serious guitar piece to play, I’ll give some suggestions. I know that many of the songs that we identify as Spanish guitar pieces are quite technically advanced, but I’m not going to leave any off my list because of their technical difficulty. Any guitar piece you hear is probably available on tablature and it’s up to you to decide once you try to play tablature if you’re trying to play something that’s too difficult for you.
So, when we think of Spanish music, what artists do we think of? There is The Gypsy Kings, Rodrigo Y Gabriela, Paco De Lucía. How about Jose Feliciano? He played Spanish guitar-style arrangements of a couple of Beatles songs.
Or there’s Spanish Caravan from The Doors. This was actually a mix of a flamenco guitar style called Grenadines and a classical guitar piece called Asturias by Isaac Albeniz. The guitar playing sounded impressive on the record, but it’s not much of a technical challenge. You can get the general flavor of the introduction to Spanish Caravan by playing the B, C, and D bar chords on the second, third, and fifth frets. They all have the same chord shape which is based on the A major chord shape in first position. Here is the barre B chord in the tab:
e–2———————-|
B–4———————|
G–4———————|
D–4————————————–|
A–2———————|
E———————–|
Now, to get the flamenco flavor in these chords, remove the barre and place your index 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 songs in Spanish that you could Google are: Compostelana, La Tarara, Volver, Bomboleiro, Bomoleira, Adelita and La Morena de mi Copla. These are all well-known songs whose chords, lyrics, and tabs shouldn’t be too hard to find on the web.