Nowadays, most wise guitarists want to learn to play rhythm guitar really well as they realise that timing is the backbone of all good musicians. Learning how to play rhythm guitar has many different rudiments.

 

 

 

Ideally, you must understand rhythm as well as any drummer. Keeping the meter is crucial if you want to play with other musicians. Rhythm guitar means understanding the chord construction, style, idiom and harmony of the song you are playing.

John Mizarolli has many interesting techniques for teaching you to learn to play rhythm. To start to learning, you must first realise some illusions perceived by musicians in general about timing.

 

 

 

One of the great misconceptions in performing rhythm on guitar is that, if you can not keep time, it means your rhythm is terrible or you have no natural rhythm - WRONG!!

 

 

 

 

Believe it or not, rhythm is related directly to how good your guitar technique is and how much you understand motor skills. In short, if your technique is bad, then you cannot manouver your fingers fast enough between chords changes or lead riffs and this results in arriving at whatever chord or scale late, and thus, out of time!

 

 

 

 

So the conclusion is, if you are a complete disaster on rhythm guitar, then your technique needs serious attention!

To learn to play good rhythm guitar you have to decide if you want to learn by using notation or by feel. Either way you must understand simple maths, the greatest and by far the most superior tool used in unraveling the secrets of rhythm. To teach how to learn to play rhythm guitar, Mizarolli strips the basics of timing naked in a few down to earth observations.

 

 

 

 

 

The first thing to sus is the word Meter as applied to timing. If a bar of music has 4 beats, and each beat is 1 second long, then obviously each bar should be 4 seconds long throughout that piece of music.

 

 

What most amateurs do when practising or going through exercises, they find something technically difficult then slow down, when they find something easy, they speed up, the result?

 

 

 

 

Some bars are 5 seconds long, others 3 seconds etc... you get the picture? You cannot elongate the bars like an elastic band timewise! Each bar must be exactly 4 seconds long ... this is good meter in laymans terms.

Rhythm is simply this. You take a bar, decide how many beats in a bar you have, in other words, work out the time signature. Then you can divide each beat into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 etc.... Deciding which part of the beat division you leave out, create all your variety of rythum patterns. The permutations and combinations of this process leads to more buzzy rhythms on guitar!

Whether you want to master James Brown style Guitar Funk, Machine Gun Metal Rhythms, Slicing Rock Riff Power Chords, Buoyant Reggae Rhythms, Rock & Roll Chuck Berry 12-bars, Sunny Latin Beats or Deep Delta Blues Rhythms, it is all down to left and right hand specialised syncopation exercises that project the style of music you love. Mizarolli can give you some excellent positive rhythm guitar tips at Music of the Spheres.

 

 

 

 

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07958 427 236

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