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<u>So how do we mute? It's often sufficient to simply reduce the pressure on the barre and other fingers so that the strings no longer touch the frets but still rest against the fingers so they are muted. This is also fairly easy to perform. If it doesn't fully mute the strings (open strings or harmonics), try to flatten any unused left hand fingers. If there are still issues with ringing strings, you may have to resort to using the right hand, breaking away from your strumming technique momentarily. '''Muted strums</u> ''' are very percussive, moreso than any other variety. ''Be sure not to confuse a muted strum, with a mute (rest).'' A muted strum uses a left hand mute while strumming with the right hand. Like with rests, we often forgo flattening all the left-hand fingers and simply lighten the pressure of our barre. Muted strums' percussive nature allows them to have clarity while strumming quickly. They are also easier to play than chords.
<u>'''Tuplets</u> ''' are rhythmic structures that subdivide a beat into a number of equally long sub-beats that isn't a multiple of 2. For example, in */4 time, sub-dividing into 2 can be done using 8th notes, into 4 uses 16th notes, and into 8 uses 32nd notes. If you wanted to sub-divide the beat into 3rds, 5ths, 6ths, or 7ths, you'd have to use a tuplet. They consist of are written in tab with a beam marker that connects line spanning above the notes, with a number or ratio of numbers written in the middle. In classical notation, the notes are beamed together with the ratio or a single number written abovethe beam. === Triplets ===The most common tuplet is a subdivision of a beat into 3 sub-beats, called a '''triplet'''. It almost sounds like a momentary 33% speed up or slow down in the tempo - you've probably heard them in plenty of popular music without realizing it. Here's an example:
: "{{squote|My God, when is he going to get to it?" ''-|Everybody''}}
<u>'''Comping</u> ''' is a technique or style used to play accompaniment for another instrument's solo. On guitar, it typically means playing chords in a certain rhythmic pattern or feel. In addition to rhythm, it may also involve dynamics, altered chords, and chord voicings. The term is most associated with Jazz, where solos are typically improvised. Good comping technique must be able to understand and adapt to the soloist's style, strengthening it rather than overshadowing or interfering with it.
<u>'''Vamping</u> ''' is playing a repeating musical idea. It can involve a single chord or a sequence of multiple chords; yet unlike a typical chord progression, a vamp is more harmonically abstract or sparse. It may involve chromatic or other atonal movements, as well as avoiding any strong cadences. Chords may be voiced with a small number of notes and played staccato. The focus is more on the rhythm than harmony, as typical in Funk.
<div class="item-wrap">{{top}}<div class="trail blue"><span class="text">[[B Diminished{{Intermediate Lesson Crumbs|B dim]]</span><span class="text">[[Other Open String Chords|Open Chords]]</span><span class="text">[[Music Theory - Minor Keys|Minor Keys]]</span><span class="text">[[Harmonic Minor and Augmented Chords|Harmonic Min]]</span><span class="text">[[Barre Chords|Barre Chords]]</span><span class="text">[[Suspended Chords|Sus Chords]]</span><span class="text current">[[Applying Rhythm to Chords|Rhythm]]</span><span class="text">[[Circle of Fifths|Circle of 5ths]]</span><span class="text">[[G Major and E Minor|G Maj and E Min]]</span><span class="text">[[5th Position|5th Pos]]</span><span class="text">[[Scales for all Positions|All Pos]]</span><span class="text">[[CAGED]]</span><span class="text">[[7th Chords]]</span></div></div>7}}
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Whenever you're talking about strumming chords, you have to necessarily think of the guitar as a ''percussive '' instrument just as much as a harmonic one. Even a great progression can become boring without a driving, interesting rhythm. We have lots of tools at our disposal to create one. The guitar's sharp attack but lasting sustain make for quite a contrast, but can still be contrasted further with rests. Mutes Strummed mutes and palm mutes further enhance the percussive nature of the instrument and increase our palette. This is all in addition to a wide dynamic range accessible by pick strength, as well as the different tone of downstrokes vs. upstrokes. We can also slide into chords, or pick subsets of the different notes on different beats. We can divide the beat in new ways, as well as practice different rhythmic grooves and even try syncopation.
== PreReqs ==
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Even the most famous shred players tend to alter their technique when strumming chords. If plucking single strings is like writing with a pen, strumming is more like painting with a paintbrush. There's typically elbow ''and'' wrist movement, with each stroke having a bit more "momentum". The back-and-forth motion should be continuous and consistent, even if you are not actually strumming on some of those strokes. Your right arm should be like a pendulum of a grandfather clock, perfectly keeping time. '''It should not be waiting on the left hand to fret notes.''' It's more important to stay in-time and play on the beats than to perfectly fret every note, but obviously if your left hand is way off, it's still going to sound bad. If you can't make the chord shapes fast enough to keep time, you'll need to either slow down or work more on your left hand chord shapes.
Typically, the right hand should be strumming with downstrokes on all the beats and strumming upstrokes between the beats. For example, in 4/4 time, the downstrokes are the quarter notes on the beats, while the upstrokes are the eighth notes in between them.
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For any beat, we can strum a chord, sustain a chord strummed on a prior beat, play a muted strum, or rest. <u>'''Rests</u> ''' become quite important to get a good rhythmic feel to strumming chords - they are simply moments of silence between our playing, but their contrast can be just as powerful as an accented chord. Our [[Basic Technique|normal muting technique]] of flattening our left-hand fingers across the strings, as well as resting the right-hand palm against the strings near the bridge works best; but in the heat of the moment while making chord shapes, you may not have time to flatten the left-hand fingers. Particularly in the case of barre chords, it's often easier And you want to simply reduce the pressure on the barre and other fingers so that the strings no longer touch the frets but still rest against the fingers so they are muted. Together with the keep your right-hand this should be sufficient to mute the stringsmoving in time for good strumming technique.
''If barring on a strong harmonic placement, such as on the 5th, 7th, or 12th frets, you may need to shift position slightly when muting to avoid getting a natural harmonic instead of a strong muted strum.''
q q e e e e|q q e e e e|
/ / x x x x / / x x x x
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== Playing Off-beat ==
|Applying Rhythm to Chords#Puttin the Stank on Power Chords|Accents
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Playing off-beat is a form of '''syncopation''', producing an unexpected, complex-sounding rhythm. It can be quite tricky to learn at first, as it breaks from the more typical approach of using predominantly downstrokes (on the beat). You still maintain the pendulum-like momentum to the right hand, strumming down on the beats and up between them, but not necessarily hitting the strings. This means we will have plenty of "phantom" downstrokes but played upstrokes.
Off-beat rhythms typically don't feature ''only'' playing off the beat, but start on the beat and venture off. Thus, we have to get used to the feeling of alternating between on-beat and off-beat strumming.
1 2 3 4 |1 2 3 4 |
q e q q q| e q e e q |
/ / / / / / / / / /
d d u u u u d d u d
Where this gets really tricky is when there are a greater variety of chord durations, such as dotted quarters, sixteenth notes, or even tuplets. And when combined with rests, muted strums, and quick chord changes, it begins to become overwhelming. It's best to practice this and other patterns on a single chord, getting more and more comfortable with the concept before trying to work it into real-world applications.
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Here's a rock-type way to strum an accented '''backbeat'''. You can add even more emphasis to the backbeat by [Palm Muting|palm muting]] the 2-note power chords on the A and E strings - while this doesn't make the strummed full chord any louder, it creates more contrastscontrast, creating a perception of loudness.
1 2 3 4
E-3--3--3--3--3--3--3--3-
Rather than emphasizing the downbeat, a '''Raggae feel ''' often plays a rest, muted strum, or root note of the chord on the downbeat/backbeat, waiting for the odd even beats to strum the entire chord. Additionally, it uses an upstroke on the strum, often emphasizing the higher notes of the chord, getting a thin, percussive sound. Within the beat, there's often a swing feel, repeating the beginning of the beat, like an echo.
1 2 3 4
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Sometimes an interesting way to accent a chord is by [[Legato (Hammer-on, Pull-off)|sliding ]] up or down into it from a half-step below or above. This is most commonly found in jazz and funk, as well as blues and thus older rock.
1 n 2 n 3 n 1 n 2 n 3 n 1
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1 |2 n |3 tr lt|3 u n u|4
C |/ / |/ / / |/ / / /|/
The "---3---" above the strums indicates a the triplet - here we have a quarter note on the first beat, 2 notes for the 2nd beat, 3 on the 3rd, and 4 on the 4th. We count this as "1 2 and 3 trip-let 4 uh and uh". I included the note names: q - quarter, e - eighth, s - sixteenth. === Conceptual Deep Look at Tuplets ===Tuplets can get incredibly complex, used in [[Syncopation, Polymeter, and Polyrhythm|polyrhythm]], an advanced topic we cover later on. While its kind of pointless to try to expand on tuplets beyond the common triplets and 6:4 tuplets (2 chained triplets) at this point, I want to expose the full nature of the concept rather than leaving you curious.
{|class="wikitable"
Often the group of notes is all the same type and consumes the entire beat. For instance (in 4/4), you'll see a 3:2 tuplet of 3 eighth notes, or a 6:4 tuplet of sixteenth notes, or a 12:8 tuplet of thirty second notes. In these cases, you often only see the numerator of the ratio marked. We assume the denominator is however many of that note normally make up a single beat. In 4/4, 2 eighth notes, 4 sixteenth notes, and 8 thirty second notes all equal 1 beat.
It's more rare, but there are cases where the ratio must be specified because the rhythm would otherwise be ambiguous. For example, you may have a single eighth note marked with a 6:5 tuplet, then 3 quarter notes marked with a 8:7 tuplet, then 1 quarter note marked with a 24:23 tuplet. Believe it or not, this actually adds up to a perfect 4 beats of time. I'll prove it.
* 5 8th notes = 2.5 beats. The 1 6:5 eighth note = 1/6 of 2.5 beats = 15/36ths of one beat
* 7 quarter notes = 7 beats. The 3 8:7 quarter notes = 3/8 of 7 beats = 21/8ths of one beat, or 2 and 5/8 beats.
* Adding the first two bullet points above gives us 15/36ths + 21/8ths = 120/288ths + 756/288 = 876/288 = 438/144 = 219/72 = 73/24
* to get 4 full beats, we need (4 * 24)/24 = 96/24ths. We already have 73/24ths, leaving us needing 23/24ths.
* We invert this to get our tuplet for the last quarter note - 24:23. It equals 1/24 of 23 beats, or 23/24ths of 1 beat.
* 73/24ths + 23/24ths = 96/24ths = 4/1 = 4 beats. So our crazy 5 note combination actually adds up to 1 measure of time in 4/4.
Most of the time, such crazy math isn't necessary or really even useful. It's usually clear what the composer or transcriber wanted you to play when you look at the notation. Simple triplets can be a bit difficult to understand and even more difficult to execute at first. But once you can consistently play triplets, a rabbit hole of rhythmic possibilitiesemerges. But this This takes us back to what we first learned in the [[Music Theory Basics#Rhythm|Music Theory - Rhythm]] lesson. The whole concept of rhythm - using time signatures, tempos, beats, and measures - is designed to provide us a framework to organize musical ideas temporally. Writing and playing rhythms that deviate so wildly from the chosen framework is perhaps a bit counter-productive, unless the desired effect is to re-encompass the randomness and chaos that would ensue if we totally removed our rhythmic framework. Using random note durations (without tuplets) may not line up phrases with measures and down beats, but they would still line up with the beats, or at least divisions based upon a multiple of 2. Using random tuplets on the other hand would certainly cause notes to line up randomly off timed with all the beatsbreak down our entire concept of a rhythmic framework.
=== Strumming Tuplets ===
Now as far as strumming rhythm goes, triplets or other tuplets that contain an odd division of a beat (such as 3rds, 5ths, or 7ths) are going to throw us off a bit. We play them the same as above by speeding up and playing on each stroke. The problem is we end up reversing our up and down strokes, due to the odd division. If the pattern has two triplets, then we don't need to worry about it because they will cancel out. If not, we need to find some space to try to get back on beat. Or we just have to recognize that we've reversed down and up strokes and keep chugging along.
==== Using Space to get Back on Beat ====
1 n 2 tr lt 3 4 n
d u d u d u (d)(u) d u
Here we strum another triplet on the 3rd beat, but only pick the initial upstroke. Phantom strum the other two hits.
==== Two Triplets in the Same Measure ====
1 n 2 tr lt 3 n 4 tr lt
d u d u d u d u d u
Here we switch so that we're using upstrokes on beats 3 and 4; however, the triplet on beat 4 will get us back to downstrokes on the beat in the next measure. We just keep alternate picking and let the two triplets cancel out.
==== Triplet with No Space ====
1 n 2 tr lt 3 n 4 n
d u d u d u d(u)d u
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A <u>'''swing feel</u> ''' breaks down each beat into an unequal pair of durations, with the first duration long and 2nd short. This creates a feeling similar to using an upbeat to emphasize the downbeat, but for every beat rather than for a measure. A more basic explanation is that you are delaying the second of every pair of notes, usually on eighth notes. It's usually marked in sheet music or tab with "swing feel", then the closest interpretation:
--3--
A unique way to embellish a certain chord is to strum it slowly, arpeggiating it. The strum is still much faster than using individual pick strokes for each note - you play the strum just slow enough so that you can hear each note separate from the others but keep your hand's momentum steady like a normal strum.
1 2 3 E-------0-------0------------0-- B------0--------0------------0-- G-----1---------1------------1-- D----2----------2------------2-- A---2-----------2------------2-- E--0------------0------------0--
Alternate-picked arpeggios typically have less rhythmic variety on the individual notes. However, they have an ascending or descending nature that can form its own form of rhythm.
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A good way to make rhythm playing more interesting is by throwing in some '''[[Legato (Hammer-on, Pull-off)|legato ]] embellishments'''. The more seamless of these involves moving from the 2nd or 4th to the 3rd, via hammer-on or pull-off, respectively. However, it can also work virtually any lead-in note(s), supplied the transition is quick enough.
E--3-----3------3-----0-----
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A common rhythm used for comping comes from the <u>'''''Charleston</u>''''', which features a rhythm of a dotted quarter note, an eighth note, and a half rest in 4/4 time. The rest can be sounded by slapping the right hands onto the strings, generating a percussive sound before muting them.
1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n
1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n
/ (x) / x
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== Vamping ==
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E--2-2-x-x-2-(x)---3-(x)-3---3-p2--
A----------------------------------
E----------------------------------
{{top}}
== Puttin the Stank on Power Chords ==
A--5-------X-X-X-X-5-(X)-5-(X)-3----3-5-
E--3-------X-X-X-X-3-(X)-3-(X)----------
{{top}}
== Homework ==
* [[Djent]]
[[Category:Guitar]]