Hi fellow guitar or should I say axe-slingers and welcome back!
I’m pretty sure that you have learned many chords already whether from this blog or from somewhere else. But let me ask you, when you play a series of chord progression, do you find yourself playing these chords (in whatever key or songs) sounding pretty much the same? If your answer is yes then the problem lies in your knowledge of rhythm guitar playing.
But in this article I will try to simplify it for you so that you’ll see how you can easily formulate your own rhythm and apply it to most musical situations particularly when only your guitar serves as accompaniment.
First we establish that for most musical situations we use the 8th note rhythm which is 2 notes for beat.
To start with try tapping your foot in a moderately slow and steady pulse or better still if you know how to use a metronome, set it to 70 bpm (or slower if you like).
Now try strumming using all down strokes and lock in with the beat. For this purpose play a single chord let’s say G. So by doing this you are playing a quarter-note rhythm. But notice that your picking hand has to swing upwards before each time you do a down stroke. What if each time on its way up it also strums the strings? This gives you an 8th note rhythm feel now doesn’t it? Be mindful of the beat though.
From doing that, we have created a pattern:
DOWN UP DOWN UP DOWN UP DOWN UP ... and so on.
Note that ‘DOWN’ is in bold which indicates it is played simultaneously with each beat
From this pattern we can make your rhythm guitar playing more fun and interesting by deliberately NOT HITTING the strings on either up or down stroke.
Now let’s try
DOWN UP DOWN UP DOWN UP DOWN UP DOWN UP DOWN UP DOWN UP DOWN UP
Make sure your picking hand motion doesn’t alter or stop. Keep it steady. Although we are missing the strings at ‘UP’, the picking hand carries on to do the same as though we were playing a steady DOWN-UP-DOWN-UP. If you do this right you will hear that it sounds like a horse galloping.
Here’s another variation (what I call the ‘feel good’ rhythm)
D U D U D U D U D U D U D U D U
And yet another (commonly used in Reggae and Ska)
D U D U D U D U D U D U D U D U
Now you see there are so many things that you can do with this and I’m leaving you some assignments to do:
1. Come up with more 8th-note based rhythm of your own.
2. Experiment with 8th-note triplets, 16th notes and sextuplets also.
3. Apply them to a series of chords or songs that you know. Tip: chord changes almost always occur during a down stroke.
4. You can combine two or more rhythmic ideas in one musical context to make it more unique-sounding-- very useful when writing your own songs!
Write everything on paper when deriving your own rhythmic feel and practise them so that you get those feels. Really simple, isn’t it? Until next time.
PS I offer free tips and advice on whatever playing obstacles and issues you might have, just feel free to comment below.
