Rock, blues rhythm that you can play by yourself on guitar - Blues Rhythm Guitar Lesson - EP281

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hi this is Brian with active melody comm this week's guitar lesson is all about rhythm and is designed to help you become a better rhythm player at least give you some ideas for some things that you might be able to do with Phil Lakes and some strum patterns to help improve your rhythm playing so we're going to take a look at this rock blues composition that's a standalone composition so that means there's no jam track required you can play this with whatever tempo you want so if it's too fast for you you can slow it down it sounds a little bit more like a blues song if you speed it up it's got more of that rock blues kind of feel but it's very versatile it also works nice on an acoustic or electric guitar so whatever guitar you've got you can follow along and we're gonna break it all down note for note over the course of two videos and this video we'll take a look at the first half if you'd like to watch the second half and download the tablature for this lesson you're gonna want to go to active melody comm go to the weekly lessons page and do a search for EP 281 alright so let me just mention tone I always get comments on tone and I try not to go there just because there's so many variables of tone I don't have a clue what everyone's setup is and we're all gonna get different sounds anyway even with the setups even if we have the same setup will still get different sounds because your fingers and everything are all factors in tone but for those of you that are curious I'm using a Kemper profiler and I'm using a matchless amp in that profiler now don't go out buy Kemper profiler you can use you can dial this in with just about any guitar amp combination all you need is a little overdrive on your amp a little bit of reverb and then the guitar I'm using for this is a Les Paul and I chose this guitar because of the pickups these humbucking pickup have a little more meat on the sound it sounds a little grittier and that's kind of more what I was going for you could do this with a Stratocaster with a single coil pickup you could dial that something very close in but but that's what I was going for and I'm on the trip the the bridge pickup with the treble and the volume all the way up so it's as treble as you can get it okay so this song is in the key of E and it's a 1 4 5 chord progression your 1 chord is in E your 4 chord is in a and your 5 chord is a B and it's just those three chords that we're playing off everything happens around three basic chords and you know it starts the root of this thing is this rhythm that goes like this and this is kind of like guitar rhythm 101 we're gonna start with this rhythm because it's really carried throughout this entire thing and you got to know this as a rhythm player because you'll use it in like a blues shuffle you'll use it in rock and roll you'll use it in country it's the same premise it's the same sort of power cord thing that we're doing down in the first position with the left hand what's changing there and those different sounds is what I'm doing with the right hand so let's start with the right hand and I want you to just to watch what I'm doing rhythmically with the right hand now you're gonna notice you're gonna hear a difference in those there's you know one two one two one two you're gonna hear one is aggressive and one is soft or one is hard and want to stop that's probably easiest way to describe it hard soft hard stop and so it starts off with a hard strum and what I'm doing there is I'm hitting string six five and four I'm trying to you don't have to be super accurate with this but just try and get those at least get those bottom two strings and then the second one are the the one in between those is the soft one and that I'm just hitting the sixth string so it's hard soft hard soft and and I would start off if you're not familiar with playing this type of rhythm by just doing that mute the strings don't worry about your left hand just try and get a rhythm you become a drummer it's that if you feels like you have a drumstick in your hand you're playing a snare drum so the other thing that I'll add to that which I'll touch on more as we get into it is when palm muting so I'm taking this part of my hand resting it on the strings so that I get this out it mutes the strings just a little bit if I don't do that it's just too much it's too much sound so you're controlling the sound by resting your hand on the strings you just kind of play around with where where you want your hand to be okay so let's now switch gears and go over to the left hand so with the left hand we're gonna bar we're gonna be playing an e power chord and a power chord is just the root and the fifth out of the major scale of a course so so for example for e you'd have 1 2 3 4 5 the 1 and the 5 just those two notes together that's an e power chord it sounds kind of empty and that's because it's missing that third interval so we're gonna play down here we're gonna play this lower octave but that's an e power chord actually most of these chords we're gonna be playing actually all of them are power chords ok so to make that you're just really playing strings 6 5 & 4 and I'm just barring with my index finger on the second fret and barring strings 5 & 4 it's kind of like an E minor I guess but you're not you're not defining that 3rd you're just playing the bottom okay so once you make that and you've got your hand right hand resting on the strings - palm mute you're gonna want to start to do this let me slow that down now what you'll notice is every time I'm hitting the the open E string or that sixth string that's happening every time but in between those I'm going but so I've got that bar there on the second fret like I mentioned but I'm also adding my pinkie now some of you may want to use your ring finger for that but it's on the fourth fret fifth string one like this alternating back and forth I want to put it all together it sounds like that so you're gonna want to play around with that if that's awkward for you just ignore everything else beyond the rest of this video and try and get that down even if you have to play it really slow that's okay but that's what you're trying to get and that becomes really the spine of this whole thing that's what we're gonna keep going back to that rhythm we're gonna keep falling on that rhythm okay so the song starts with that and then there's this little harmonized that's a harmonized third and I got that from Tony Joe white he passed away just last week I just found that out so if you if you didn't know that Tony Joe I just died which is really unfortunate and so I've been listening to some his stuff and I thought you know I'm gonna work in a Tony Joe White thing a lick and so that's what this is I'm a little tribute to Tony so let me show you how to play then I'll explain what it is so it'll make sense but my ring finger is on the fourth fret fourth string my index finger is on the 2nd fret third string so we're playing those middle two strings they're 4 & 3 we just slide that up to Fred so you can use that now going forward as a rhythm player now you've got this so now when your plan at your blues jam you're playing rhythm you can play a little variation on it or you can go you can walk it down you can start to do things with that so look at all these little extra things that we're adding on as new words that you're adding to your vocabulary you can start using using them when you communicate with other people okay now what this is is that's just a major scale for E but it's harmonized so if I look at the E chord by an E chord down here and I look at strings four and three let's just isolate those two strings it's a shape that looks like this we're gonna call that shape one so shape two is the one that we just learned and we're gonna slide that up two frets there's shape 2 again so shape one shape too we're gonna now go back to shape one shape one shape to shape two and back up to shape one and what I just played there was the E major scale but it's harmonized a harmonized third so you got [Music] not the cleanest but that's what it is so now you've got all these two other different positions that you can start to use when you're playing leads when you're playing rhythm but look at how it all connects back to that ecord so then hopefully a light bulb goes off for some of you and you think okay wait if that's the E chord what if we're playing in the key of G look at those same two strings that's your E chord right there right so you'd start it here so now you can play the G and you start to use those fill legs as well alright a sidetrack but it's I think it's important okay so let's go back to the beginning now okay now after that what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do and by the way in the tablature I have everything notated I've also got the strum patterns for this first part just because it's this is once you get this in the first part it's gonna carry out throughout the rest of it but after we do that so everything's downstrokes to this point all with down strips of the right hand and then after that then I'm gonna come back to my power chord with my left hand and I'm gonna play the fourth string with an upstroke the sixth string with a downstroke and the fourth string again with another upstroke so all together that goes like this and then we're right back into it so listen now that's pretty cool even if you learn nothing else in this this little up-down is super useful in your rhythm plane so even if we skip the Tony Jill white leg and we do the up down up strings four six and four look what you can do now with your rhythm you can play this is a nice little variation that a little hiccup in there but it adds a lot to your rhythm playing okay we're making progress and then it stops one two three four so all of that is really just the intro and now we go into the main part of the verse I guess and it starts with this kind of a single string thing I wanted to create a simple melody now what's really cool about this is I meet playing between the second fret and the fourth fret and this is another take away when you're playing in the key of E you can remember that on the sixth string and the 5th string and the fourth string you have the second fret and the fourth fret to play any of those notes and they're all gonna work if you're playing in the key of E so you can play [Music] you start to work around different notes and just start to improvise and those are those make for really good feel like so that's what I'm using for an intro and if you wonder what that is if we're wondering what that is that's the major pentatonic scale the bottom part of pattern 4 for the QB okay so it goes so it starts on the 2nd fret slides up to the 4th fret 2nd fret 4th fret on the 5th string 2nd fret on the 4th string and then we slide from the 4th fret all the way up to the 6th fret now this is getting out of that little box I was showing you but the little box is just an example of an easy set of notes that you've got now once I slide up to that 6th fret while that note is ringing out I'm gonna come down and hit the sixth string to look the open six string of that low E string and that wreath that allows me while that's ringing out to take my hand off the fretboard and come back here go back into the rhythm see how cool that is it's almost like it just keeps going it sounds almost like there's two guitar players because while one note is ringing out you're going down and resetting the clock and that's why so many songs are played in the key of E or in the key of a on the guitar because you have these strings open strings that are in key that can ring out and allow you to reposition your hand without lose breaking the rhythm all right so backing up from the beginning we have there's the Toni Jo white leg okay so after that's your first lick then it's followed with the Toni Jo Whiley and then we go into another leg goes that's uh Marty Stewart like again that's what it sounds like to me and to play that we're still in that little box here between the second fret and the fourth fret I'm going to slide on the 5th string 2nd fret to the 4th fret then there's the 2nd fret 4th string and then we go back to the 4th fret 5th string and do a half Bend and release come down to the 2nd fret on the 5th string [Music] and then look at that when I hit that I went ahead and barred there that should look familiar that's we're already making that ecord I'm already back into position [Music] to play the rest of their rhythm [Music] so practice and then we go back to the same Toni Jo white leg and that's the whole apart so now if the song moves on to the a part let me back up before we go into the a part and just play the e part one more time play us up to that point and then it's gonna make sense that it's about to switch to a alright so from the beginning we have [Music] now we have we're going into the a parts the same thing same kind of feel that harmonized third but we're gonna play it up here now let me show you how to play this and then I'll show you another little take away from this but we're gonna slide from the second fret to the fourth fret on the fourth string and then I'm gonna bar the first three strings on the second fret but only play strings two and three so we have and then watch this this is my ring finger actually my ring finger is on the sixth fret for third string sorry middle finger is on the fifth fret second and that's just picture your a major Barre chord strings two and three that's all that is if that helps you to visualize that anymore just hitting those two notes out of that Court so remember when I showed you the E chord yeah the harmonized major scale that you can walk up from this chord shape you have the same thing with the a chord check so now you can look at strings two and three and you've got this shape there's the note we slid up to right out of that a chord so you have shape one and shape too so yeah there's back to shape one shape too all the way back to shape one so what that means is now you can take this a chord shape and you can play these little harmonized third licks out of it so if we were playing in C using the a chord shape this is where Caged kicks in you know you've got right so you can start to use those legs and your playing and your solos and your rhythms it allows you to do a lot of really cool stuff by knowing those and just connect them back to the basic chord shapes now you've got one off the a shape and one off to each shape and you can do just about anything with those you could really start to make some some cool music with that okay so so the way I played that there's a I stopped the strings slid up to that harmonized third there and then I go in to that same rhythm but this time we're playing it over an a chord it's the same thing same power chord concept but instead of us playing barring here the you know the first five strings now we're just barring the first four strings so we're playing the open fifth string fourth and third it's the same thing that we were doing over the eighth we just slid it up our I'm sorry over the e we've just moved it up a set of strings that's the next thing so after you've got that rhythm going I'm gonna come up here and play and that's two up strokes so that I'm borrowing the first four strings on the seventh fret so it's upstroke muted down upstroke muted down and then oh to play that I'm gonna bar the first two four strings on the fifth fret playing strings five four and three and I'm gonna do a hammer onto the sixth fret third string see you have then after that you go right back into position to play the rest of that rhythm same way that we've been playing it that's just a nice little variation and you can do this really easily over an a chord so just remember this if you're playing something in the a in the key of a which is a common key for blues you've got this so you it allows you because that this string is ringing out and you're playing these chords along with it it allows you to break away from down here in this first position and start to do some stuff up here so that's how I think of it okay so from the a we have and then I came down away to get us back to the e and that lick it's really cool really easy to do is using the same concept of going back saying between the second fret and the fourth fret but I'm adding this note which would be the third fret and I'm using my middle finger third fret fifth string and doing a hammer on up to the fourth fret on the 5th string so after that then I come up here and play the second fret fourth string and then four to four on the fifth string and then I go ahead and bar the first four strings on the second fret do your upstroke on the fourth downstroke on the sixth and your upstroke again on the fourth and that should look familiar that's that same little little rhythm part that we've been using over and over again so we just practice that right there that's an awesome lick you can use that in any time you're playing a rhythm just you've got that your left hand stays in place at least the bar does [Music] it's real easy to play easy to find without having to look even look at your neck you can just feel it let's back up from the beginning and play up to that point we've got the e we've got the a and now we're back to the e so from the intro [Music] now we're back to the e Tony Joe line again then watch this now we're going to the B chord and this is a really cool transition to get you from the one chord to the five chord when you're playing an e that's easy to do so it's it starts with your ring finger on the fourth fret fourth string we're gonna slide up to the sixth fret index finger goes down on the fourth fret third string that should look familiar there's your that's your tawny July lick right so that's all I'm doing is I'm just playing that later but I'm breaking the notes out of it individually okay down and then you take your ring finger and you go you go back to the fourth fret fourth string so yeah and while that notes ringing out I can now put my index finger down on the second fret fifth string could play that b-corps Hey look at that those two notes are a B power chord it's the same thing as your a right you're just sliding it up so yeah there's your going between this fret and this fret just like like you have been on the E and the a same concept but we're just now having to play it like this obviously we have to create what the nut was doing before now we're having to play that with our finger so that's it that's how I'm playing it and then I'm gonna play it again and then go to the a then again and down to the e isn't that cool it's just repurposing that layer and down to the e Tony Joey there's another stop and then we go into the whole second half there's a whole new set of licks it gets a little more bluesy in the second half but I'm saving that for premium members so that'll be in part two if you're not a premium member you got to check into it it's an incredibly affordable new lessons every week like this the entire back catalogue you have the part two video you have the tablature you have all the learning materials you need to to help improve and make it easier for you all right let me back up and play through this one more time and then I'll see you in part two for the rest of this [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: Active Melody

Views: 215,621

Keywords: blues rhythm guitar lesson, rhythm guitar lesson, how to play rhtyhm guitar, how to play blues guitar, how to play blues rhythm guitar, learn blues rhythm guitar, learn rhythm guitar, learn blues guitar, blues guitar lesson, guitar lesson, guitar lessons, rhythm guitar with fills, fill licks guitar lesson, music education, guitar education

Id: SgnQWsDfNzI

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 03 2018