Essential Grooves Part 2

You can never have too much rhythmic confidence and range! You don’t want to be stuck with the same three strumming patterns for all situations, whether you want arrange your own songs or join in jam sessions.

When you’ve explored this material, you will be equipped to play at different speeds confidently. You will…

Essential Grooves Part 1

When it comes to developing rhythm skills, working to broaden the number of strumming patterns, grooves and feels we are comfortable with helps us in a variety of ways:

It means there are more rhythms that are available to you in your own composition and accompaniment choices.It becomes easier to hear and transcribe rhythms present in…

Triads with a root on string 2

A triad is a chord that includes three specific notes – 1 3 5 for major triads, and 1 b3 5 for minor triads.

The numbers refer to the relationship between each of the notes in the triad. 1 is the root note of the chord that designates which chord it is. If our root…

Sixteenth Note Rhythm

What do we mean by sixteenth note rhythm?

We have done quite a bit of down up strumming using 8th notes, or a 1+2+3+4+ count. Using this type of strumming, there is a maximum of 8 possible places in the bar where you can strum – there are eight arm movements, four downstrokes and four upstrokes. With…

How To Understand Rhythm For Guitar part 1

Part one looks at the difference between the pulse (the regular beat that goes through the music) and the rhythm (which is organised around the pulse, but isn’t always the same thing). We look at some easy ways to train your ability to identify the pulse and to start training your right arm to synchronise…

Mind The Gap

G space

C space

These audio tracks have a chord, and then a bar of space in between them. We can use them to train your skills in many different areas.

Fretboard – Find the tonic note on one string or multiple strings while that chord is playing. Find other notes in between as per swamp or…

Rhythm guitar techniques: bass note picking

This lesson covers a very effective way of playing chords where you split the sound between the lower and higher notes in each chord. This creates a sense of two types of sound combining, and it has a different character to playing all of the strings at once. You can create very propulsive and driving,…