*Note: In this article, the author assumes one is playing right handed, meaning that the right hand is doing the strumming and the left hand is fretting chords on the neck. So for all you lefties out there, and again for the purposes of this article, the “right” hand is the one you have dangling at the end of your left arm. Being left handed, you’re smart enough to figure that out!

Why we all learn to play guitar the wrong way

Students of the guitar in their first year of learning often complain that they can’t “seem to get a good strumming rhythm going.” They will inevitably attribute this to there being something wrong with their right hand action. They ask for advice about strumming patterns, pick grips, finger style patterns and so on, but all the time, what is really wrong with their right hand … is their left hand!

The fact is that almost everyone learns to play guitar with their hands working the wrong way round. Not, I hasten to add, because they’re stupid (otherwise they wouldn’t have chosen to learn guitar, would they? ), but because there is actually no real choice. Let me explain and I think you’ll see what I mean.

The “correct” way to play guitar is to establish a continuous steady rhythmic strumming or picking pattern with the right hand and then superimpose fretting chord shapes, licks and riffs on that pattern with the left hand. This is variously described as “right hand leading” or “making the left hand the slave of the right.”

When you first start learning guitar however, this “correct” way of playing is nigh impossible to achieve without guidance from a good guitar teacher. The problem lies in the fact that the left hand simply can’t at first, move anything like quickly enough from chord shape to chord shape. So the “continuous steady rhythmic movement of the right hand” is frequently interrupted by having to stop and wait for the left hand to catch up with it. Of course this is always more evident with the trickier chord shapes: C, F, B7, Dm etc…

As a teacher you can first help your students resolve the concern this causes them, by proving to them that actually their right hand works just fine; that they don’t “simply lack rhythm” or suffer from any other kind of musical blind spot.

This can be done by getting them to mute the guitar with their left hand (or by tying a sock round the neck!) and playing the guitar purely as a percussion instrument. I usually play a song in the normal way and ask them just to strum along on “percussion guitar” any way that seems, to them, to fit the rhythm I am playing. This approach instantly leads to a strong sense of confidence that the right hand actually works beautifully. This of course helps shift the attention back onto the left hand, which is where 99% of the work needs to be done in the first stages of learning guitar.

First beat, first priority

Over many years of teaching guitar, I have developed a method of ensuring that students learn to play in time from lesson one onwards. This approach really pays dividends, as it is always easier to make new habits than to break old ones.

To teach (or teach yourself) good timekeeping I suggest this approach:

1. Pick a simple chord sequence – for now let’s use this easily recognisable generic sequence, done in 4/4 time, by the way:

G | Em | C | D7 :||

2. Take time to see that your student memorises each shape, and then have them play each chord just once. One strum on G then one strum on Em and so on, round and round the sequence just practicing changing chord shapes.

3. Once they can do this okay in their own time, set a timed task. How many times through the sequence can they get in sixty seconds?

4. Whatever result they achieve, repeat the test. Have  them attempt to break their record.

5. If any one change (for example Em to C) appears more problematical than the others, then focus in on it and iron it out by lots of repetitions. Then get back to the record-breaking test on the complete sequence.

6. Once they can get through the sequence at least four times in sixty seconds go to the next step, otherwise it’s best just to keep repeating Step 5.

7. Explain that you want them to strum the right chord on beat one of each bar, but for the other three beats they should focus on getting the next chord shape ready. Then count them in and strum along with them. You strum all four beats to help them keep count, but encourage them to join in only on the first beat of each bar. You encourage them with something like:

“Ready with the G chord? …One…Two…Three … Four … Strum! Ready with the E minor ?…Three … Four … Strum! Ready with the C? …Three … Four … Strum! Ready with the D7?…Three … Four … Strum! And back to the G … Three … Four. .. Strum!…”

As they get the hang of it you can catch your breath and cut out the blow-by-blow instruction.

This is actually a great exercise for all sorts of reasons:

• It underlines the importance of arriving on time for the first beat in each bar.
• It teaches the student to think ahead and move shapes early
• It keeps them focused on the changes, which is where the work most needs to be done.
• Above all it imprints them really early on with an experience of keeping in time.

This all helps build a really firm foundation for future development.

In Part Two we’ll look at the dangers of using a metronome as well as how to find your “internal rhythmic centre.” And I why I hate songbooks that print the chord symbols above the lyrics!

Nick Minnion is a guitar teacher of some 38 years experience and is the author of several courses, books and articles on guitar teaching that can be accessed from his main website: www.teachguitar.com

This becomes very important when you encounter more complicated rhythms, as you’ll soon see. But I’d like to take a moment to clue you in to something that will also help you immensely when it comes to playing rhythm – written music notation. Notes written in musical notation do double duty. They tell you which note to play and they also tell you how long any given note should last in terms of beats.

Tablature is certainly helpful, but usually only to a point. For example, take a moment and play this for me:

You certainly can handle the notes themselves, but notes are only one part of music. Rhythm is another and it can be very important. How important? Well, suppose I tell you that the example you just played is the first line of the Christmas carol Joy to the World? Did you play it like that the first time? Or did you play it simply, giving each note a single beat? Quite a difference, no?

Since we’re truly only concerned with strumming (for now, anyway), you only have to concern yourself with reading the rhythm aspects of notation. We’ve a number of lessons here at Guitar Noise about this, like Timing is Everything. You might want to take a few moments to look that one over, particularly since it gets into counting and that’s right at the heart of what we’re discussing.

When you count out the beats of the song, you usually do so in terms of quarter notes. We did this in “Example 1″ in Part 1, where you strummed down each quarter note like this:

I’d like to take a moment now to introduce some of you to rhythm notation. Rhythm notation uses just the rhythm part of notation. Instead of writing all the notes of a chord out in notation, a simple slash is stuck at the end of a stem, like this:

These are four quarter notes of the G chord, just as you saw in “Example 2″ a few moments ago. It doesn’t matter in the slightest where on the staff, on whichever line or space, the slash appears. All you’re concerned with is that they are quarter notes. Many music books use rhythm notation without staffs, placing strumming notation above a lyric line.

We’ll use rhythm notation for our next few examples. I’m not going to bother putting a chord in the following examples so you should feel free to use whatever chord you’d like.

Getting back to our quick review of “Part 1,” you also read and saw how when you strum in quarter notes, you’re actually strumming in eighth notes when you take the upstrokes into account:

So far, so good. Now how about if you want to play some more complicated rhythms, maybe something in the style of Jack Johnson, perhaps? He’s actually a great choice because most (if not all) of his music is available in books, which means you don’t have to guess how he strums things, it’s all written down for you!

You may be wondering how that is possible. After all, no one probably went and marked every downstroke or upstroke on the notation. And you’d be perfectly right about that. But if you take a moment and apply your brain, using the information you got in “Part 1,” you’d make some important discoveries.

Suppose you want to play a rhythm where the fastest notes are sixteenth notes? First, you have to think about strumming in eighth notes. Why? Because sixteenth notes are half the value of eighth notes, just like eighth notes are half the value of quarter notes. So if you were to strum a measure of eighth notes with all downstrokes, like this:

That means you’d be strumming in sixteenth notes when you take the upstrokes into account, like this:

Of course, more likely than not, you’re not going to be overly challenged by a rhythm that is either straight eighth notes or straight sixteenth notes. The fun comes when things get a little uneven, such as in strumming something like Jack Johnson’s song, Taylor.  Here’s the riff that gets played pretty much throughout the song:

This looks kind of formidable unless you are able to see it and say, “Hey, that’s all sixteenth notes! Some of them have ties, but they are all sixteenth notes and I can do that!” First, chart all the notes out and ignore the ties. Since the two measures of this riff have the same rhythm, I’m going to just use the first one in the next two examples:

Now, when a note is tied, that means you just play the first of the tied notes and not the second. That means that we miss whatever strum happens to fall on the second of the tied notes, like this:

Instead of the rhythm and the strumming being a total mystery, you’ve got it down perfectly. Let’s try the whole riff:

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That wasn’t hard at all, was it? Not to figure out, anyway! Executing the strumming correctly will take a bit of practice, but nothing you aren’t capable of.

In the chorus sections of Taylor, a second acoustic guitar part comes in playing some open position chords while the first guitar is playing the riff we just worked out. Here is how the strumming of the second guitar looks in notation (rhythm notation this time):

By the way, I’m going to use a regular open position G instead of the “G5″ if that’s okay with you. I just like the sound of it better. Following the same process we just used for the first guitar part, we notice that there is a combination of eighth notes and sixteenth notes here. First, we want to just write out the count, and here’s something very interesting about that – It seems that many notation software programs, particularly those used in guitar books, usually separate out the groups of sixteenth notes or eight notes or dotted eighth and dotted sixteenth notes and what have you, in clusters of single beats. This makes writing out the count a lot easier, as you can see:

Finally, just add in our upstrokes and downstrokes according to where they fall in the count and you’re good to go:

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You’ve gotten quite a bit to digest here, so we’ll save going into even more complicated rhythms for next time.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Our latest Guitar Noise Podcast picks up right where GN Podcast #26 left off. Having gotten the basics of this song under our belts, it’s time to explore what to do when (notice I didn’t say “if”) we get around to playing with another guitarist. So here we start out with a simple arrangement for two guitars.

As always, I’ll be walking you through each step, so come on along and join in the fun. And, again as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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For this Guitar Noise Podcast, we’ll work on getting the basics down, plus have a little fun with the bass line. Next time out, we’ll add the challenge of playing along with a second guitarist.

As always, I’ll be walking you through each step, so come on along and join in the fun. And, again as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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Last time out, we started with a bit of a discussion on the importance of being flexible as a guitarist. Quoting directly, to be able “to change from strumming to a single-note crosspicking pattern or to change from full chords to partial chords or even to chord melody style in midstream can make a big difference in how a song comes across.” This may seem obvious to most of you, but let’s try to drive the point home with this particular lesson.

Just as important, perhaps more so – developing this flexibility will keep you from falling back on the old “must-not-deviate-from-original-strumming-pattern” mentality, which sounds even more ludicrous, by the way, if you can manage to say it with a bit of a James Shatner impression.

Think about this: Most of us pick up the guitar to play songs. If we go out of our way to learn a single part (the strumming guitar) of a song that is done by a whole band, then our playing isn’t going to sound just like the song to begin with. So why get hung up on that when we can usually come up with something a lot more interesting that still sounds like the song we want to play?

Looking at songs as things you can arrange, pardon the pun, will give you the pluck to try out songs that you might dismiss as “beyond” your capabilities. I can’t even begin to tell you how cool it is when you’re listening to a single guitarist perform and he or she totally stuns you by coming up with a song you’ve never heard done before in a single-guitar arrangement.

So without further ado, let’s get down to the task at hand, shall we?

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

In case you didn’t read the title, we’re dipping once again into our Pink Floyd catalogue for this lesson and pulling out the classic ballad Comfortably Numb, originally released on their album The Wall. I’m pretty certain most of you are familiar with the tune, so much so in fact that I’m wondering whether or not I should even discuss the song’s structure.

Better safe than sorry, right? Like our last lesson, Play with Fire, Comfortably Numb is made up of two distinct sections – a “verse” section and a “chorus” section. Some people might like to break the chorus down into two subsections: a “pre-chorus” (starting with the line “…there is no pain…”) and a regular “chorus” (just the final line – “…I have become comfortably numb…”). That seems a little like too much work for me, so we’ll settle for two parts, okay? Laying out the song in the style of a “cheat sheet” or “chord sheet,” and going with very basic chords, it would look like this:

You can see that the two sections have their own chord progressions. The verses are made up of either two or three sets of a Bm – A – G – Em – Bm progression while the chorus goes from D to A twice, C to G twice, back to D and A (again twice) and then back to C and G again (and again, twice). The last line goes from A to C to G and ends on D.

The chorus, beginning with the repeated line of D to A, serves as the backing progression for the first instrumental solo. The last line of the chorus is still sung, though, which leads us back to the verse section again.

Finally, the chord progression of the verse serves as the backing chords for the extended solo of the outro. And that pretty much covers the structure of our song.

Comfortably Numb is played at a rather languid pace; I think it’s around sixty-five beats per minute. This leaves a lot of space for strumming and, during the first verse, Gilmour does very little of it. You can also hear that when he gets to the second Bm (at the point where the lyrics are “…anyone home…”) that he’s not really playing a Bm chord, but something a little more moody and mysterious. Back to that in a moment…

During the second pass at the Verse Section, the strumming is actually more like it was in the chorus section, a bit busier but still steady. Almost like someone managing to get to his feet, perhaps?

Example 1 lays out these two basic strumming patterns for you:

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As you can see and hear, I’ve used the Bm chord for this example but I could have used any of the other chords as well. Speaking of that Bm chord, and we’ve certainly talked about this before, you can use one of three different voicings for it in this song:

The first one is obviously easiest and those of you who are comfortable with the full barre chord version (the third choice) will probably like the way that sounds. I’m going with the second one for now, because of what we’re going to do next. But before we go on, this would be a good place to point out that you can now play this song. Seriously. You’ve got the basic chords and some simple, yet effective, strumming patterns. What more do you need?

Wants, however, are a totally different matter. And we’re working on a single guitar arrangement of our song, perhaps we want to play Comfortably Numb with a few more interesting touches than simply being locked into a strumming pattern throughout the whole tune.

So what I’m proposing is that we take a number of ideas from our various Guitar Noise Podcasts, things like combining strumming and crosspicking (from GN Podcast #8) or even the sixteenth note accent from way back in GN Podcast #4 and put them into play. We can even use a little bit of our bass line work. In fact, if you’ve read the very first lesson on walking bass lines, Connecting the Dots, you’ll see that we’ll put Examples 8 and 10 from that lesson to good use in this one.

Before we do, though, let’s go back and look at the “mysterious” sounding Bm chord that Gilmour plays at the end of the verse progressions. It’s a Bm chord where the D note (third fret of the B string) has been replaced with C# (second fret of the B string), giving what us what most guitarists would call a Bsus2 chord and it would look like this, if you were using the “second choice” voicing of Bm as a starting point;

Alright, then, I think we’re ready to come up with an interesting “template” for the verse chord progression. After doing a bit of playing around and experimenting, I’ve hit upon this:

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That’s certainly a lot more interesting than just strumming around. The first measure starts with a Bm chord, but I’ve left the high E (first) string open so that I can hammer onto the second fret to get the F# note to complete the chord. There’s a bit of sneakiness in that on my part, too. Since that F# note is the note of the start of the melody, I usually find myself trying to find it and often slide up to it from E. So this little hammer-on helps me to find the melody line right from the start. For the third and fourth beats of the measure, I use simple upstroke arpeggios, removing my finger from the high E (first) string again to get a more interesting final arpeggio to contrast with the one of the third beat.

I like the combination of strumming, hammer-ons and arpeggios in the first measure so much that I use it again in the second measure for the A chord. The first beat begins with what some folks call “Asus2,” which is just an A chord with no finger on the B string. I hammer-on the second fret of the B string and also catch the full A chord on the upstroke. And since we’ve been doing okay with the hammer-ons, why not give the pull-offs some equal time? You’ll find one in the last arpeggio that occurs on the fourth beat of this measure.

Since the G to Em transition that occurs in the third measure is dramatic, the easiest thing to do is to emphasize it by keeping the rest of the strumming in this measure relatively sparse. Those of you with sharp ears may hear that I’m sometimes catching a few extra notes on this short descending bass line. This is done by hitting all three of the low strings while playing it:

The thing to watch out for here is that you want to mute the A string when you go for the F# note (second fret of the low E) in the bass. Simply lifting your finger that is already sitting there at the second fret just enough to dampen the A string should do the trick.

Another thing to notice is that we’re what might be a different voicing of the G chord that some of you may not have come across before (although some of you do recognize it, I’m sure, from other lessons here at Guitar Noise). Having the D note (third fret of the B string) allows you to just leave it there when you play your Em. This added D note turns the Em into an Em7, which gives the chord a more interesting feel. You’ll hear on the last MP3 file that I strummed this Em7 chord very close to the bridge of the guitar, giving the strum a little more of a ‘ghostly” effect. Using a technique such as this every now and then can also make a song more interesting to your listeners. Not to mention to yourself!

Because the third measure is practically all strumming, it kind of makes sense to follow that up with a measure that is nothing but single picked notes. In my playing around, I discovered that I liked the arpeggios I could create by leaving the high E (first) string open while playing the Bsus2. This creates another weird chord that I’ve chosen to call “Bsus2sus4″ just to keep the “Dadd2add4″ used in our Easy Songs for Beginners lesson on Man on the Moon company. If you finger the chord using your ring finger on the fourth fret of the D string, your pinky on the fourth fret of the G string and your index finger on second fret of the B, that will free up your index finger to perform the hammer-on and pull-off at the third fret of the B string.

So far, so good? As always, it’s important to note here that this “template” is merely a suggestion. There is no end to the ideas that you can come up with and while you’re playing you may certainly come across more than one or two that sound good. It also goes without saying that there’s no reason to make things more complicated than you have to. If you can only sing while strumming simply, and if you’re the only one singing and playing, then you have to go with what you’re capable of. But do yourself a favor and keep trying out adding little touches here and there. As you gain more confidence in your abilities, you’ll find yourself able to put your practice into your performance.

And this is important to remember when we get to the chorus. If I’m not handling the singing duties when playing, I like to use the guitar to add the wonderful keyboard arpeggios that are part of the hook of the chorus. When singing, though, that makes thing a bit difficult. Sometimes a compromise is in order.

For instance, the notes of the D arpeggio in the first measure of the chorus, along with the tablature you’ll often find both online and in “guitar tablature edition” books of Pink Floyd music are:

This certainly sounds fine. But if you’re more partial to the sound of ringing strings, you might find this interpretation of the same notes more up your alley:

You might recognize this particular voicing of the D chord from many of our other song lessons and articles here at Guitar Noise. For more about figuring out how to come up with a different chord voicing yourself, check out Moving On Up or Multiple Personality Disorders; both articles are certainly worthy of your attention. The easiest way to finger this, by the way, is to use your index finger for the fifth fret of the high E (first) string, your pinky on the seventh fret of the B string and your ring finger on seventh fret of the G string.

And we’ve not mentioned it yet, but if you decide to play Comfortably Numb on a twelve-string guitar (no reason not to!), this particular technique will sound very cool.

Back to the point – borrowing the lines from the keyboard is a great idea, but if you’re not able to handle it and sing, there’s no reason to abandon it all together. After all, during each of the measures of A, you’re only singing on the first beat. Likewise the first two measures of G in the chorus section. So, strumming the D’s and C’s while playing arpeggios on the A’s and G’s should work out fine. In the following example, I’ve written out each of the chord changes as arpeggios, but on the MP3 you’ll hear the example played twice – once with all arpeggios and once with alternating strumming and arpeggios:

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The A and G arpeggios vary slightly from the original recording. Actually the A is an exact copy of the second pass on the recording while the G is different in that I’ve changed the notes used in order to take the best advantage of the guitar’s two open high strings. If you’re playing with someone who’s got that part covered, then you obviously don’t have to worry about it. If you’re on your own, might as well make things easier on you. Chances are likely that if I hadn’t told you it was different, you might not have even noticed. You’re still using the flavor of the song and that will often carry you through.

For the second pass through the D, A, D, A, C, G, C, G of the chorus, I want to give the music more of a push, so I go for all strumming (and these are all just slight variations of the “possible chorus” strumming from Example 1) but I punch things up by adding a sixteenth note accent at the last half of the fourth beat of the previous measure, like this:

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Again, and you’re undoubtedly tired of hearing this by now, this is also just a suggestion. You can use these sixteenth note accents in combination with arpeggios or with different strumming patterns or not use them at all. This is, after all, your call as arranger. You are the one who knows what you can (or can’t) play at this point in your guitar playing adventure.

You might also hear in the last MP3 example that I manage to find the melody notes of the very last phrase of lyric (“…have become comfortably numb…”) in much the same way we found the melody line of Play with Fire. To accomplish this, I need to change the last C to Cadd9, which means adding the pinky to the third fret of the B string in order to get the D note of the melody. And then, after a bit of careful picking with the G chord, I finished things off with first a partial D chord, using just the A, D and G strings, and then a full D, strummed as close to the bridge of the guitar as possible in order to quiet things down a bit for the second verse.

And that’s pretty much everything. You’re good to go! I hope you’ve had fun with this lesson. The main thing to remember is that Comfortably Numb is a song where your playing carries a lot of emotional weight, so why sit on a robotic strumming pattern that displays none?

And for those who noticed that I totally ignored the solo between the first chorus and the second verse, don’t worry. Time permitting (although that might mean sometime after August), I will write out a single guitar arrangement for that to help you out.

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

In our latest Guitar Noise Podcast, we’ll finish our look at “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” by looking at a slightly more complicated strumming pattern as well as learning about a new voicing of the G7 chord. This particular use of the G7 will be turning up again in the upcoming Guitar Noise Intermediate Songs lesson on “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

As always, I’ll be walking you through each step, so come on along and join in the fun. And, again as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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In our latest Guitar Noise Podcast, we’ll continue to explore how to sing and play at the same time, using “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” as our example.

This time out, we’ll look at a new strumming pattern and the begin to add fills, working with a cool D to G bass run very much in the style of the Beatles’ “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away.” And it’s a lot easier to play than it sounds. No lie.

As always, I’ll be walking you through each step, so come on along and join in the fun. And, again as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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In our latest Guitar Noise Podcast, we’ll take a look at getting comfortable with strumming with an eye toward being able to sing and play at the same time. We start with a new song, the iconic “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and we even have a cheat sheet for you:

We’ll spend most of this podcast getting good at a couple of strumming patterns so that we can tackle it in earnest next week.

As always, I’ll be walking you through each step, so come on along and join in the fun. And, again as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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With many apologies for it taking so long, let me welcome you to the latest Guitar Noise Podcast, the second part of our look at the old Irish folksong, “The Star of the County Down.” Here we’ll make an arrangement for the last half of the verse and also do something fun with the chorus. When you’ve finished with this podcast, you’ll have a complete song for your repertoire.

As always, I’ll be walking you through each step, so come on along and join in the fun. And, again as always, please let us know what you think.

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First we go over the basic structure of the song and then work on creating a cool introduction for it, which is always a good thing as a good introduction can also serve as a nice interlude between the verses.

And speaking of the verses, we also start to look at how to come up with some interesting strumming ideas, fills and bass lines for the basic verse of this song.

As always, I’ll be walking you through each step, so come on along and join in the fun.

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As always, I’ll be walking you through the process step by step. Hope you enjoy it!

Peace

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Our nineteenth Guitar Noise Podcast, just up online a few days now, gives us an introduction to some very important strumming techniques – anticipation, dynamics, and (believe it or not) using rests as part of a strumming pattern.

We begin with an explanation of anticipation and how using it easily fits in with all that we’ve learned about strumming so far. Then we add rests and dynamics to a basic pattern to make it sound a lot less generic and a lot more like “real music.”

Finally, we follow a very simple exercise of emphasizing the upstrokes when we play to make our use of anticipation more natural and, hopefully, get you through all the problem points.

As always, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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Today, we’ll wrap up our work with the traditional song, “Streets of Laredo,” one that some of you may recognize from Johnny Cash’s “American Recordings IV.” We’ll pick up where we left off and then take a little side journey into modulations, which are basically temporary shifts of key, In this particular song, this means using a D major scale to create a walking bass line even though we’re in the key of G.

We’ll also take a quick look at using a “walking chord pattern” in place of a walking bass line. We’ve seen this specific pattern before in our Guitar Noise song lessons on Imagine and Babylon, so it shouldn’t be too hard for you to pick up on. And it sounds terrific.

As always, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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Let’s get right on with our work with the traditional song, ”Streets of Laredo,” one that some of you may recognize from Johnny Cash’s “American Recordings IV.” In this Guitar Noise Podcast, we’ll look at creating walking bass lines from D to G chords. We’ll also start to tackle the “chorus” section of this song.

As always, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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Sometimes, though, this “guitar-centric” outlook can have less than humorous effects, particularly when it comes to rhythm. People are constantly asking “What’s the strumming pattern of such-and-such a song?” “How do I figure it out?” Maybe because we as a people are being more and more visual, to the point where reading is often eschewed in favor for video or other images, but guitarists nowadays think of rhythm in terms of “up” and “down,” the motions of strumming, instead of thinking of rhythm in much simpler terms – numbers and counting.

In this lesson, the first of several on this topic, we will go over the very basics of strumming and how it applies to notes and rhythm. This lessons ties in almost exactly with two others here at Guitar Noise, so you might want to go over Keeping Time and Strumming for Beginners. Everything that we cover in this lesson is already in these two articles, basically I’m just adding sound files and trying to make sure we start on the same page.

Next time out, we will see that if we can read notation, even only the rhythmic aspect of notation, we will never again have to “wonder what the pattern is.” Simply being able to read how the music is broken up into beats and patterns within the beats, we’ll always be able to come up with a pattern that works. Quite often it will even be the same pattern that’s being played on the recording. Not that doing so should ever be your first concern!

Beyond that, we’ll try to use what we’ve learned in the first two lessons and apply it ear training. That may seem like a stretch to you at this point, but I can guarantee you something – if you are willing to count out loud, there is no rhythm, no strumming pattern that you won’t be able to suss out, pardon the pun, given a little time.

There’s something about counting out loud people don’t seem to like. We teach a lot of music lessons here at my home, both guitar and piano. And we do our best to encourage students to count out loud when they’re having problems with rhythm. You’d think we were asking them to eat slugs or something. Yet as soon as they start counting out loud, their rhythm problems with a tricky passage almost invariably straighten themselves out.

Children hate counting out loud because they think they’re old enough to not have to do that. Adults hate counting out loud for the very same reason. No one wants to look like he or she is a beginner. But what they don’t see (and hear) are professional musicians who, when faced with a tricky rhythm passage, doing exactly that – counting it out loud in order to make certain the timing is understood and played correctly.

If you listened to the first Guitar Noise Podcast on strumming (and if you missed it, or any of the other Guitar Noise Podcasts, which are all about various aspects of strumming, by the way), you can find it on the Guitar Noise Blog, you might have heard me talking about sock puppets. No lie. If you know what sock puppets are, you know that they have a limited vocabulary. They can either nod their heads “yes” or shake them to say “no.” When we’re strumming a guitar, it’s the “sock puppet saying no” motion that gives us smooth and steady strumming.

More important than that, this strumming motion also gives guitar players a built-in metronome. It’s as if you have a string attached between your strumming hand and your foot, provided you’re tapping your foot along with the music (something you should definitely get into the habit of doing). Your toe goes down on the downstroke and up on the upstroke.

Strumming will, of course, get more complicated than this eventually, but for now, you’ll be surprised at how counting, along with the sock puppet / constant motion approach will make strumming easier. Let’s start out very simply and strum four quarter notes (one beat each). Since the vast majority of songs most of you will play are going to be in 4/4 time, it seems like a good place to start:

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Now, you can pick any chord you’d like for this exercise. I choose G simply because I play it a lot and it’s a chord I often default to when I’m just goofing around on the guitar.

This is strumming straight quarter notes, and since you’ve read any one of our many fine articles on rhythmic notation, you know that they are one beat each. Hence, we’ve four of them per measure.

Even though we’re strumming down on each chord, we’re also strumming up. You’re just not hitting the strings when you strum up. But you still to go through the “up” motion of skipping upstrokes, otherwise you’d never get the second downstroke, right? Skipping strings on the upstroke comes fairly naturally, even though we never think about it.

If we were to hit the strings on both the up and down, we’d be playing eighth notes, like this:

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And let’s take a quick note here to mention that when you strum up, don’t hit all the strings. Just catching two or three of the high strings is fine. Again, you might want to refer to our first Guitar Noise Podcast for more on this.

Coming back (and again pardon the pun) to matters at hand, you should note that what I mentioned earlier about using your strumming motion as a steady metronome works. You’re going “down” on the beat while coming “up” on the off-beat, or the half-beat if you will.

The point of these two exercises is to show you that (a) all rhythms pretty much are a matter of keeping time with your “sock puppet” and (b) you are probably already comfortable with skipping the “ups” of the “down and up” of any beat. Once you understand that all beats are already a matter of breaking them into an “up and down” motion and once you discover that all strumming patterns are a matter of skipping the occasional up or down, you’re good to go. Strumming is really that simple!

But it is a matter of getting into the feel of the beat but not letting yourself get so carried away that you forget your sock puppet, which should be set on automatic pilot according to the tempo of the song.

To prove this point, let’s take a look at Exercises 8 and 9, from Tom’ Keeping Time, conveniently re-written in notation and tablature. I’ll keep the count:

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You should be discovering that, with a little concentrated effort, these patterns are not all that difficult to play. Occasionally skipping an “up” is usually pretty easy for most beginners. But skipping downstrokes, ah, that’s another kettle of fish.

Let’s tackle this technique by prepping ourselves with the following pattern:

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This is just another pattern where we’re hitting each beat with a “down” and occasionally missing an “up.” Take a little time to get it into your system. When you feel ready, we’re going to skip the “down” on the third beat. Set? Here we go:

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What usually happens here is that, for whatever reason, people freak out and forget to keep their “sock puppet” constantly moving. We have to go through the up motion of skipping upstrokes, as mentioned earlier, but many people don’t make a down motion when they are skipping the downstroke. If you get in the habit of having your sock puppet being in perpetual motion, you will never fall off the beat. Guaranteed.

This last example, by the way, is the same as “Exercise 18 in Tom’s article. You’ll also find it used in many of our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons, such as Nowhere Man and it gets more than a workout in many of the Guitar Noise Podcasts. Pretty handy little rhythm!

You task for next time is to try out some of the many rhythms in Tom’s article, as well as the Guitar Noise Podcasts. If you can get a handle on this “skipping the downstroke” technique, you are almost there in terms of handling the complex rhythms we’ll be starting in on next time.

As always, I hope that you’ve had fun with this, not to mention that I also hope that you’ve learned a few things.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

We’ll continue with our “using the stuff we’ve learned so far” by looking at “Streets of Laredo,” a traditional song that some of you may recognize from Johnny Cash’s “American Recordings IV.”

In this, our sixteenth Guitar Noise Podcast, we’ll start with a basic ”bass / strum” in 3/4 timing and then add some fancier work to both the bass and the strumming.

As always, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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Guitar Noise Podcast #15 takes up right on the heels of #14 – we’ll still be using “Handsome Molly” as an exercise to incorporate the various lessons we’ve picked up in our podcasts thus far. The emphasis here will be on combining measures (or half measures) of strumming with measures (or half measures) of crosspicking. Plus, we’ll add a couple of riffs to make the change from our G to D chord a little more interesting.

As always, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

For our fourteenth Guitar Noise Podcast, let’s take stock of the many things we’ve learned so far and, over the course of the next number of GN Podcasts, put them to use in song. After all, that’s why we’re practicing, right? For starters, we’ll use the traditional tune, “Handsome Molly” (also known to many as “I Wish I Was in London”), which has a nice, simple chord progression of G, D and C.

In our thirteenth Guitar Noise Podcast, we move into the realm of swing. First, we’ll look at the feel of swing and of how “swing eighths” differ from the “straight eighth” notes that we’ve been using in our strumming up to this point.

And, since swing eighths are the basis of blues shuffles and rhythms, we’ll use our new strumming style in the “twelve bar blues” format as a way to get ourselves comfortable with the use of swing eighths in strumming. Then, as we have in past lessons, we’ll explore this rhythm further by combining it with a very cool walking bass line. You’ll be sounding like a Texas blue legend before you’re done!

As always, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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We’re going to try something a little different with our twelfth Guitar Noise Podcast. I’m not even sure it’s got a “technical” name!

Basically, and for lack of a better way of putting it, we’ll be “stretching out” our downstrum – turning it from a typcial downstroke to something that’s more of a musical punctuation mark. It’s easy to do and allows us to vary a typical strumming pattern in an interesting way while practically changing nothing in what we’re doing.

As before, we’ll examine this technique and then combine it with different patterns as well as with other techniques learned from our previous Guitar Noise Podcasts.

As always, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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Let’s continue with examination of percussive rhythmic strumming techniques and move from palm muting to string muting. Just as with our last GN Podcast, our eleventh one will take us from the basic elements of string muting and then work on integrating this new technique into the strumming patterns and techniques we’ve covered thus far.

For the most part, we’ll be focusing on the G chord, throwing in a short G to C to D progression as we gain more confidence in our string muting abilities.

As always, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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After some initial exercises, we’ll be using the Am chord a lot, first doing an Am to G to F (or Fmaj7) to E chord progression where using palm muting allows us to create an interesting walking descending bass line.

Then we’ll focus again on the Am chord (along with the F or Fmaj7) in order to add hammer-ons and little fills to our basic palm muting strum. You’ll sound like a Seventies singer/songwriter in no time!

As always, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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Here, we’re going to take ideas from many of our past GN Podcasts and use them to create fills that will make our basic strumming sound even better. We use one of our earliest strumming patterns, not to mention one of our earliest chord progressions (G to D to Am, G to D to C) and then work out a couple of interesting fills to spice things up a bit.

While we will work with some specific fills, the object is ultimately going to be coming up with your own fills. So you might want to read up on ideas with an old Guitar Noise Guitar Column, called Tricks of the Trade. You might find some very helpful tips there.

As always, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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As you might guess from its title, this GN Podcast combines elements that we’ve been working on since our series of podcasts began. We’ll take one of our earliest strumming patterns and add a bit of crosspicking to it, giving us even more choices of variations and embellishments to the original strumming pattern.

Most of the work in the first two-thirds of this lesson involves a chord progression of G to Bm to C and back to G. In the final third of the podcast, we’ll add a second progression of C to G to A7 to D (or D7) to the first – making the whole thing sound a lot more like a typical song.

As in our previous Guitar Noise Podcasts, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. So put down your painted wings and giant rings and get your guitar and come along and play! And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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Our seventh GN Podcast picks up right on the heels of the sixth, working with the Am to G to D progression in 3 /4 timing that closed our last podcast. This time out, though, we add the technique of crosspicking (using individual notes instead of strumming or partial chords) to give some variation and interest that basic strumming wouldn’t cover. Finally, we also work in the walking bass lines from GN Podcast #6 to our crosspicking, making things even more interesting!

As in our previous Guitar Noise Podcasts, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. So don’t think that you ain’t going nowhere, get your guitar, get down on that easy chair and come along and play! And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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Is this really the sixth GN Podcast? Amazing how time flies, especially when it’s spent doing something this enjoyable! I hope you’re all having fun with these podcasts as well.

This time out, we begin looking at 3/4 timing. First, using the chord progression G – Em – C – Am, we will employ a “bass/strum” pattern and then add in a bit of a walking bass line to move things along. We’ll then tackle a “straight eighth note” approach to the bass strum, using alternate picking to create a more flowing strumming pattern. For this part of the podcast, we’ll be using a G to D chord progression and then switch to Am – G – D. And if this sounds at all familiar, just consider yourself a lucky man (or woman) to have good ears!

Finally, we’ll combine both this straight eighth note strum with a walking bass line to have an impressive sounding bit of music!

As in our previous Guitar Noise Podcasts, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. So don’t think that you ain’t going nowhere, get your guitar, get down on that easy chair and come along and play! And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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In this, our fifth GN Podcast, we’ll continue to make our playing more interesting by adding walking bass lines into our chord progression strumming. We’ll first work on a generic exercise to get ourselves geared to the task of adding a bass line. This involves altering our basic “bass / strum” pattern very simply.

From there we’ll use a progression of G to Am to C and back to G and work up to the following strumming pattern:

As in our previous Guitar Noise Podcasts, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. So don’t think that you ain’t going nowhere, get your guitar, get down on that easy chair and come along and play! And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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In this GN Podcast, we’ll work on two specific topics. First up will be a quick look at sixteenth notes and a smart little rhythm fill that you can use as an accent when strumming a chord. We’ll also see how you can use it to spice up (and cover up!) a chord change.

From there we’ll begin work with “partial chord strumming,” in other words, just using some of the strings to strum with. And rather than examine a specific pattern, we’ll focus on developing a feel for your guitar. Hopefully you’ll start to feel more confident that you can strum where you want to without thinking twice about it. If not the specific string than at least the general area

Both of these general topics will be coming up soon when we focus on ways to create strumming that is more “organic” rather than something that sounds like it came from a sampler.

As in our previous Guitar Noise Podcasts, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. So get your guitar, get yourself comfortable and come play! And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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In this GN Podcast, we’re going to start with looking at the differences between strumming various note values, in terms of timing, and try a very simple exercise to help you work out the strumming of quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes and triplets.

We’ll then focus on the “generic” strumming pattern from the end of the second podcast and work up ways of making it more interesting and fun by applying ideas from the first two podcasts (hammer-ons and alternate bass lines) to the pattern.

As in our previous Guitar Noise Podcasts, I’ll be talking you through the process. So get your guitar and get comfortable and come play! And, as always, please let us know what you think.

Peace

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Our second GN Podcast picks up where the first left off – we’ll take a “basic” strumming pattern from the first podcast and then spice it up by means of adding simple hammer-ons to the chord being strummed. By changing the timing of the hammer-on or by using it on different notes of the chord, you multiply the number of strumming patterns you can create. We’ll be working with both Em and Am chords for this task.

We’ll also discuss a few practice tips concerning muscle memory and speed (not to mention magic and life!) as well as try out a new strumming pattern that is used in more songs than you can imagine. In fact, you can use it with many of the Easy Songs for Beginners lessons at Guitar Noise, such as Nowhere Man.

As before, I’ll be talking you through the process, and I hope that I do as good a job as last time. Let us know what you think!

Peace

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