subject: Guitar Lesson -- Simple Rhythm Tricks I [print this page] Rhythm guitar is an art formRhythm guitar is an art form. Doing it well takes a lot of patience and practice.
Fortunately, all of the more sophisticated techniques that you hear in recorded music (or live), has simple beginnings. What we're going to do here is to show you a simple foundational technique that in and of itself is used a lot. Mostly you will hear this on an acoustic guitar, but you will also hear this played on an electric on occasion.
This little "trick" involves playing the root note (the letter name) of the chord followed by a partial version of the chord itself. We are going to use this root note as a bass note, so we will play the lowest possible available note of the chord. Let's use 8 basic open position chords to illustrate this:
A [ x 0 2 2 2 0 ]
C [ x 3 2 0 1 0 ]
D [ x 0 0 2 3 2 ]
E [ 0 2 2 1 0 0 ]
G [ 3 2 0 0 0 3 ]
Am [ 0 0 2 2 1 0 ]
Dm [ x 0 0 2 3 1 ]
Em [ 0 2 2 0 0 0 ]
Use all down picks. Play slowly and evenly 1 beat per note or chord. Concentrate on accuracy. Gradually increase your tempo as you get comfortable.
Note, again, that you are only playing a part of the chord. If you wish, you can try strumming the whole chord. For example on the above Em chord you could also include the 6th E string in your strum. But you usually see this technique done with a partial chord.
Although this fundamental technique may sound a bit cheesy, you hear this and variations of this technique quite often. One simple variation has the root note followed by 2 chords (This will put it in 3/4 time), another followed by 3 chords: Let's use the A chord to illustrate:
Try the base technique plus the variations on these chord progressions:
A-D-E-A
D-G-A-D
G-C-D-G
Am-Dm-E-Am
Am-D-E-Am
Em-A-Em
C-Am-Dm-G-C
G-Em-C-D-G
Again, I cannot stress enough that accuracy is important here. Only increase your tempo when you are comfortable and accurate with the tempo that you're working on.
There are more variations to this technique, but what you want to start doing is to listen for it and its variations when you play your recorded music.
