Flamenco FAQ

Questions, Answered

What does compás mean?

In Spanish, compás is the ordinary word for a metre or a time signature. In flamenco it also names something more specific: the rhythmic cycle a palo is laid out on — a fixed number of counts, some of them accented, that repeats under the whole performance.

That second meaning is the one this site is about. Singing, playing and dancing flamenco all happen on top of the compás, and a cuadro stays together because everyone in it knows where the cycle is at every moment.

What is a palo?

A palo is one of the traditional forms of flamenco — the soleá, the alegrías, the seguiriya and the bulerías are four of them. A palo brings its own compás, its own mode or key, its own verses and its own mood, so naming the palo tells a guitarist most of what to play before anyone has sung a note.

Why is a twelve-count cycle not just two bars of six?

Because the accents do not fall evenly. Several of the best-known palos run on twelve counts, and the published descriptions of the soleá’s cycle read it as a mixture of groups of three and groups of two — a combination of triple and duple bars inside one cycle — rather than as two equal halves. Counting it as two bars of six would put accents where the palo has none and miss the ones it has.

Exactly which counts carry the accents is what tells one twelve-count palo from another, and it is what the compás pages declare, palo by palo, from their published sources — then read against the two even counts, so you can see which accents each one explains and which it misses.

Which palo should a beginner count first?

Many learners start with the soleá. It is sometimes called the mother of the palos — not because it is the oldest, but because several other palos, the alegrías among them, take their compás from it. Once its cycle is in your hands and your ear, those palos arrive already half-learned.

The technique of the strumming hand lives with the instrument, not here. This site’s job starts once you can make the sound: where the count is, and what each seat of the cuadro does to it.

Is a flamenco guitar the same as a classical guitar?

They share their strings and their tuning — nylon, tuned EADGBE — so every chord and scale page here is drawn for the network’s nylon-strung classical guitar in standard tuning, and links to the same page on String Warrior, the network hub that is that instrument’s deep home. The two instruments differ in how they are built and set up for the sound each tradition wants, not in their notes.

Do I need to read music?

No. Flamenco has been passed on by ear and by example for as long as it has existed, and the vocabulary on this site — counts, accents, chord names, the notes of a scale — describes what you hear rather than replacing it. Clapping a cycle along with a recording is still the fastest way to learn one.