E Rock 'n' Roll on the Flamenco Guitar

Where E Rock 'n' Roll lies on the fretboard of a guitar tuned EADGBE, and how a flamenco passage lands it on the count.

E Rock 'n' Roll runs 6 notes to the octave, laid across an EADGBE fretboard with every E marked — the pitch a phrase keeps coming home to.

Major pentatonic with a b3 rubbed against the natural 3 — bright and bouncy with a bluesy smirk. Playful, swinging, and built for boogie riffs.

Heard in: Fifties rock, rockabilly, boogie-woogie, Chuck Berry-style riffs, and jump blues.

On the flamenco guitar a scale is the raw material of the falseta — a composed melodic passage the guitarist drops between sung verses — and of the runs a toque answers the cante with.

Whatever notes a passage runs through, it is measured in compás: it sets off and comes to rest where the count of the palo allows, so every scale here is finally heard against a cycle of accents.