Changes

The 4th, 5th, and 6th strings are all tuned in 4ths, like all pairs on adjacent strings, except for the 2nd and 3rd. All the interval shapes that worked between the 1st and 2nd strings will work between the 3rd and 4th, 4th and 5th, or 5th and 6th strings. Let's put this to action:

Play that nice and slow. Now instead of simply moving up or down the fretboard (towards the bridge and nut respectively - in relation to the ascending and descending fret numbers), we can stay relatively close to a single position. Ultimately, music is not about learning scales. Real life melodies will usually be more vertical than horizontal, and visualizing the intervals for a particular key will likely be easier to incorporate into playing around a certain position.

Remember those "power chords" we played on the 1st and 2nd strings which sounded familiar but a little wimpy? Let's try them on the 4th, 5th, and 6th strings:

Don't worry about counting the rhythm at first. Just play the intervals nice and slow and try to give them the same rhythmic space as appears in the tab. Once you get more comfortable making the power chord shape and moving between each pair of strings and changing positions, you should be able to start getting the rhythm a bit better. Can you recognize what song this is? Once you recognize the tune, the rhythm will become much easier. It is probably too difficult to play at full speed at this point, so play it nice and slow. This is the "acoustic jam" version. ;-)

Here's some quick practice to master playing on and off beat. Play this to a metronome and count every beat. It is more difficult than it looks. Just keep at it. Start slow. If you can't get it, go even slower.

This is a simple rhythm that accents the downbeat but plays every beat.

Same thing but also accenting the 3rd beat, so this accents the on-beats - it's a classic on beat rhythm, reminiscent of the common "boom ssss taah ssss" drum pattern.

Here we are accenting the down beat and using the up beat to enhance anticipation of the down beat.

Kind of combines fig. 4 and 5. We aren't simply accenting the on beats but using the up beat to enhance the down beat. Notice how the 1st beat has a bit more emphasis than the 3rd.

Classic off-beat rhythm. Reminiscent of some ole west or folk music.

Here we have a kind of hybrid, but the effect is that the first measure creates confusion and the second measure alleviates it by having a clear on-beat rhythm. It feels almost like we've left 4/4 and are in 3/4 with the kind of "bam bam sss|bam bam sss" pattern, but then the single accented power chord on the 3rd beat of the 2nd measure puts us back into 4/4.

Time signatures can switch in the middle of a song; however, this is generally reserved for when the change is either permanent or endures for a long period of time. Or if doing so makes understanding the music more clear. So if you had a musical phrase with 4 notes in 4/4 time than the next phrase is the same thing but with one extra quarter note, then it repeats, it would be favorable to switch to 5/4 for that second measure then switch right back to 4/4.

Again, we have a hybrid rhythm that briefly implies a 3/4 feel, but we emphasize the down beat in the second measure and use the up beat to anticipate the down beat in the first measure.

This is the exact same rhythm as fig. 9 but we've condensed it down to one measure. Set your metronome to half the tempo you previously used - now the duration is exactly the same. The only difference now is that you have to play eighth notes between the beats. This is a primer for more difficult stuff. Be sure to count!

This is the same as figure 8, but now we're not playing anything in between the accented power chords. Also, we're using eighth notes instead of quarter notes, so we have to play between the beats. But we're not getting too difficult yet.

Ok, so now things are difficult! We start on beat but quickly switch off beat from the eighth note on the 1st measure 2nd beat. This persists all the way until the 2nd beat of the 2nd measure. This is very common in strumming patterns - the rhythmic pattern switches from on to off beat from measure to measure. Listen to R.E.M. Losing My Religion or Radiohead Fake Plastic Trees to name two off the top of my head.

Note: we are sticking to using only down strokes at this point. I recommend that - get the idea of counting and playing off-beat engrained in your head before trying to worry about whether you should be down or up picking any particular note(s). Later when we get into strumming, we'll see this gets even a bit more complicated.