How does Paco de Lucia play guitar so quickly?

Answer 1

Paco is the only flamenco guitarist in the world who uses three fingers to play picado.Picado is rest stroke with i,m,a fingers.Important to note that it HAS to be rest stroke,free stroke would make it TREMELO and sound soft and lack attack.

not true

: Paco plays over 95% of his picados with only 2 fingers-- index and middle. Gerardo Nuñez often uses all 3 fingers for his picados, so the idea that Paco in the "only" player to do this is completely false. Paco achieves his speed with consistently flawless technique, slow exercises, confidence, good circulation, painstakingly filed fingernails, and on top of this, an incredible talent for moving his fingers quickly and accurately. Back in the 1970's when I was taking Flamenco guitar lessons there used to be speculation about whether the great guitar players used three fingers for picking. The few people who I knew who had seen Paco or Serranito playing always claimed they had never seen them use anything other than the first and second fingers. Now we've got YouTube you can check it out. I remember talking to a guy who met Paco when he was performing in Australia with the Luisillo dance company. His picado was just as fast then, when he was about fifteen, as it was when he started making records. He says himself in a documentary about him called Light And Shade, that he spent many hours in his room with the guitar in his early teens and some people say his father was extremely intent on making him a star, so he imposed a disciplined routine on Paco. Just as an interesting aside, the only guitarist who certainly used anything but the usual fingers was Manitas De Plata who used the first and third fingers for picado. He was a Basque gypsy with a very rough technique but very popular with the public. He taught that technique to a friend of mine and the theory behind it was that because the first and third fingers are more or less equal in length, it's easier to pick that way. I used it myself for a couple of years but eventually went back to the normal way.