Know The Different Rhythm Styles Played on Guitar

What up guitar peeps, Darrin Goodman here with another mini guitar lesson for you. When searching for rhythm guitar lessons one must ask themselves what style are you looking to learn. Rhythm is the most important aspect to playing guitar or any other instrument for that matter. Take notice of what people do when they are listening to music; bobbing there head, tapping there foot, clapping there hands, etc… We are naturally linked to rhythm. Your heart beats with a rhythm. The universe is made up of many different rhythms all working together, it is everything. Let’s look at some of the different styles of rhythm that are associated with different styles of music. We are only going to look a few as there are far to many to look at them all. The Blues: The blues can be played with a variety of rhythms, but the staple of the blues is the shuffle. Here is an example of common blues shuffle rhythm in the style of Stevie Ray Vaughn.

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Country: In country guitar there are many different rhythms used, but let’s look at the alternating bass line, which was very common in classic country.

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Heavy Metal: There are a lot of different rhythm styles for metal, but one that kind of ties a lot of them together is the “chuga chuga” rhythm that was made popular by bands like Metallica. This rhythm style has tight staccato notes with heavy palm muted sections.

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Finally let’s look at Jazz. The strumming rhythm in jazz is known as “comping”. This is an example of comping from an old jazz standard, “Blue Bossa” Learning different rhythm styles outside of your main genre interest is very good for your playing and can help you to play outside the box a little and may help you discover something new. I hope this was helpful to you in your quest for rhythm guitar lessons. Until next time, Darrin