Welcome back! Today I wanna help you learn rhythm guitar.
When you are just starting out you usually learn open chords and not really any rhythm at all. If
you do learn a rhythm, it’s probably just following the beat and nothing fancy. Well in this lesson
I’m gonna start exploring the whole concept of rhythm guitar a little bit more; the goal here is for
you to come out playing at least 4 new rhythms and being able to come up with some on your
own.
So for this entire lesson we are going to use the same progression: F#m, E, Bm, A. The only
thing that is going to change is the rhythm, but the chord order and quality will remain the same.
We could start off by playing a very simple rhythm:
It is very easy and for the pick pattern I would use: Down, Down, Down, Up, Down, Up.
I would use this pattern for each measure.
What I just showed you sounds cool, but still very basic so let’s spice things up a little bit. Let’s
skip some hits and extend some notes:
It starting to sound way better right? So basically whenever 2 notes are tied together it means
that you play the first note and not the second one, but you sustain the note until the second
one is over. The rhythm pattern for this would be: Down, down, up, down. Pretty simple right?
You could also grab the first pattern and just alternate the order of the rhythm like this:
I simply brought the 3rd and 4th beat and put them on the 2nd and 3rd beat! That simple and it
already makes a huge difference. You can totally do that with any rhythm you want, it’s a great
way to come up with new rhythms! just alternate the order of the beats.
Finally I wanna show a more complicated rhythm which basically combines extended notes with
anticipations:
The only thing to watch out here is the anticipated chord before the 2nd and 4th bar!
The rhythm pattern is: Down, up, down, up, up, up, down, up, up. This pattern represents the
1st and 2nd bar together! Once you get to the 3rd bar you start the pattern again.
This is all for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and please remember to check out our
entire database of videos at GuitarControl.com
