La Rumba Flamenca: How To Play Rumba on The Flamenco Guitar

Perhaps the most understandable of the all the flamenco styles, the rumba has an upbeat 'party' feel to it – even contemporary pop songs use it now. It's light-hearted and good fun, but also something you can put into your own style of music, because it's in a common rhythm (4/4).

To quickly get an overview of the most common rumba rhythm patterns, Rafael demonstrates it below:

For those short on time, we break the essentials of it down below in 30 second clips: here is the most basic rumba rhythm (right hand) pattern:

And for the left hand – to get a sense of the sounds and scales of the rumba, Rafael demonstrates a rumba flamenco scale here:

But onto our lesson: in the video below, Rafael explains the rhythm / syncopation for the rumba – including how to make the famous 'tap' sound. This is taken from part of our fuller online flamenco guitar course

The basic chords for the rumba are easy for beginner guitarists – we discuss these in our article on flamenco guitar chords, and Rafael uses them in the video above.