Having Trouble Hearing Rhythm Guitar in Music? Try THIS!

hey guitar enthusiasts welcome to lesson five of my rhythm series in this lesson we're going to be talking about how can you actually hear different intricacies of strumming in songs so let's get into the lesson now students ask me all the time how do you hear and it's hard to hear when there's a band going on so a lot of times when i'm creating rhythm for songs a lot of it goes off what i feel but there are certain things that i can hear a lot of times so take a song like wonder wall if you guys want to go listen to that i'll put the lesson up there very very intricate strumming but i can hear the rhythm i can hear the strumming if you can hear the the guitar you can sometimes hear it very well but sometimes when there's a lot of bands like if you listen to a lot of eagle stuff sometimes they have a lot of guitar guitar players so it's hard to tell which guitar is doing what so you do the best you can and sometimes we have to figure out strumming patterns for songs that don't even have guitar how do we do that so the biggest thing again working on ear training okay training your ear to hear things now the guitar has a very different sound when you hit a down strum versus an up strum can you hear the difference what do you hear [Music] so a down strum has way more attack than an up strum it also has a darker sound because usually you know by the time you get to the bottom you might not always hit that bottom string but you always hit the bottom string on an up strum so up strums have a more tinier sound because often times you don't catch the top base notes see if you can hear the difference i'm going to strum slowly here's a down strum up strum [Music] down strum up strum it's very slight you might be like lauren i can't hear a difference at all and that's okay you may not be able to hear this difference in the beginning but i want you to hear it i'm going to use a brighter sounding g let's see if you can hear it now can you hear it now hear the difference the up strum is much brighter so when i'm trying to figure out what strumming pattern do i use for a song i first start with the foundation are we in three four are we in four four okay we went over that in an earlier lesson how to figure out if we're in three four or four four we gotta know what number to count to then i will listen i'll just say okay if if i can find an acoustic version of a song i like working off acoustic versions because you can it's all guitar you can hear it very well but if i'm working off a song with a band i'll say okay can i find the drum line can i find the rhythm and i'll count that rhythm one two three four one two three four okay i found the rhythm and now i need to know do i hear anything between each of those counts so let's take a rhythm like we did um before let's take one two and three and four let's take that rhythm okay so here we have one two three four one two three four okay so let's do it again one two okay so i want you to listen i'll play it a little bit slower you'll be able to hear where the up strums are i want you to try i'm going to play it in a loop so that you guys can figure this out but listen for the up strums [Music] and i'll use that brighter g again okay so if you can't hear it close your eyes close your eyes and see if you can hear it ready and i just want you to count to four i want you go one two three four i really want you to focus on that downbeat and i want you to listen for if you hear something between the beat all right ready one two three four so if you listen to that rhythm and you were really counting you would hear nothing between beat one and two you were just here one two and you would hear nothing between beat four and one four one but you would hear something between two and three and three and four one two three four so that just automatically tells you there's up strums okay that's what the this is i know i'm i'm oversimplifying it it can be hard to hear these things in the beginning but again if you can get the foundation of what you hear because there's also things strumming patterns and notations called 16th note strumming patterns which means you have to listen for the things that fall in between the eighth notes we're not going to do that here um in this lesson at least i might continue the series we'll see or or you can go do the strumming course and you'll learn all about 16 notes there i do a lot of 16 note strumming there too but that's what i want you to do i want you to listen can i hear something between the b because if i hear something between the beat then i know that there's an up strum in there okay so that that's point one another thing that you can commonly hear in songs there's a lot of songs where remember i told you the snare drum falls on two and four you can almost hear the accent of the two and four on the guitar like a song like course with no name [Music] they have this very i mean that's more of like a shuffle rhythm which we're not going over but you can hear the two and four so you can do accents so that's something to listen for do i hear something snapping out louder one and two [Music] so you'll hear that a lot in music that accent on the two and four so pay attention for that something else that you might hear strumming pattern wise particularly in rock music you might hear something called palm muting which is the chords don't sound like they're ringing through for some reason they almost sound muffled think of a song like um heart of gold [Music] hear that it's just an eighth note pattern instead of doing down up we're doing all downs but i'm using a technique called palm muting [Music] and that's how you get that effect so see if you know what to listen for you can start hearing things in music and in rhythm something else you can listen for crescendos starting soft again it's just an eighth note rhythm 1 and 2 and 3 and 4m but we're getting louder as we go [Music] and that's how they create that effect okay so that's what i want you to do with your rhythm take a song that's more acoustic go listen to it and see if you can hear the rhythm okay i'm gonna play a bit of a song um so this song is someone else's so i if i get hit with copyright i might have to cut this section out but hopefully i don't and it stays in here so it's going to be um tracy chapman fast car and i'm going to listen because this has finger picking all right there's not really a big drum line there is some drums but i want to go over if i were going to listen to this how i would figure it out all right so here we go now there's finger picking there's not really a lot of drums here there is a little bit they must be using brushes on like a snare drum because i can hear them and i'm going to try and lock in with that okay just to find what is my rhythm what's the rhythm here okay i don't feel like i can sway with this song right so that tells me it's in four four one two three four one two three four can you hear it [Music] okay that's that's the intro so we found the rhythm but this is more fingerpicking i'm gonna fast forward us to more of the chorus section here hey guys real sorry i'm here editing this video because youtube actually blocked the content for me using the tracy chapman song so i'm gonna have to cut out a short section of this video but i'm gonna jump right into the next section which is actually me demonstrating the song and hearing the rhythm and this is the great thing about singing too because a lot of the vocal melodies follow the chord changes i think it's um this one actually has a capo and i think it's a e minor to c um i think um it's actually c to e minor so we've got i her voice is following the chord change so sometimes you can listen for rhythm if you can't hear the guitar that well you can listen to the vocal melody for rhythm ideas all right so what i'm going to do is i'm going to play an acoustic version of this song and see if you guys can hear the changes so let's get our rhythm first i just want you guys to get the tempo because i'm going to do some intricate rhythms here and i want to see if you can keep the time the most important thing about rhythm is can you keep time one two three four that's our rhythm two three four one two [Music] did you guys hear the changes a little bit better that time i'm gonna count it through this time and see if you guys can hear it in that little hop that came in so we got one two three four one [Music] one two three [Music] could you hear it that time i'm gonna play one more time through listen can you hear the chord changes are you noticing that when i switch chords that first down strum is very intense it's almost like i'm i i don't know if i'm doing it intentionally to help you guys and kind of accenting that first down remember i said down strums have more attack listen one more time let's see if you can hear can you anticipate when the chord change is coming can you hear when the chord change happens there's a lot going on here but this is a good test for you guys one two one two three four [Music] so there you go that is an acoustic version i know there was a lot of strumming going on there but the key is can you find the timing because if you can find the timing guess what now we can throw one of our little strumming patterns in let's just try one two three and four it's not going to sound as good as my strumming pattern but there's a lot going on so we've got remember when we were [Music] not bad [Music] that worked pretty good so see i just took a strumming pattern i showed you earlier and i just threw it into the song did it sound as great as mine no but it worked and you notice on those c to e minor those hop rhythms i just went down down up [Music] or maybe i was doing one two three and four i don't know which one i was doing but whatev whatever rhythm you want to choose you can see just pick one throw it in the song give it a try see how it sounds you need to start hearing rhythms the more rhythms you use the more you start listening for things and hearing things the better of a rhythm guitar player you will become hey guys i hope you're enjoying the rhythm guitar series just so you know i do have a full strumming course so many people ask me like i know chords i don't need your beginner course but i really need help with strumming so if you're one of those people you feel like you know you're open chords and you're doing pretty well but your strumming is really struggling you might want to go check out the strumming course i'll put a link in the description below see you guys [Music] soon

Channel: Lauren Bateman

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Id: io17nSQTm-8

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021