In this lesson, you’ll train your frenado technique through four progressive exercises. Each drill focuses on muting a specific beat in a 4/4 measure—helping you develop control, timing, and the ability to add percussive accents to your playing.
By mastering these movements, your strumming will feel natural and you’ll be ready to apply frenados in songs like joropo, gaita, parang, and Aguinaldo.
🎯 How to Use This Lesson
- Watch the demonstration video.
- Practice each exercise slowly, then gradually increase your speed.
- Record a short audio or video clip (8–10 seconds) of your playing and send it to us for feedback.
- Follow the Audio Guide if you need help recording high-quality Cuatro audio.
First Movement
Concentrate on applying the frenado only on the first strum of each four. This is the basic way you will use frenado downwards when playing songs.
Second Movement
This second exercise will help you master the frenado up. You will be playing measures of 4 and doing frenado up only on the second strum for each measure. This strumming is extremely important as will mark the difference between an amateur musician and a real professional cuatro player later.
Third Movement
The third exercise is a variation of the first one. You will practice the frenado downwards but this time on the 3rd strum. The exercise could become difficult for you as it is easy to lose the tempo and end up playing the frenado downwards on the first instead of the third.
Fourth Movement
In this last exercise, we will learn how to implement the frenado up at the last strum. You will find that on most of the folk music, like joropo, gaita, parang, and others, the last strum is normally a frenado up
To be able to finish this part of the course we will require you to upload your media file. What we specifically want is to listen to your frenados up and down and to listen how good you keep the tempo meanwhile you repeat these measures.
Feel free to imitate what you see on the video and record a small extract, an 8 seconds audio file will be sufficient.
Homework:
Record an 8-second clip demonstrating all four movements (both up and down frenados) while keeping steady tempo. Submit it through the course platform for feedback.
