Tune up
Intro

When the beautiful Heloísa "Heló" Eneida Pinto took her daily walk by a bar where the Brazilian guitarist/songwriters Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes hung out, she was completely unaware that she would provide the inspiration for a tune that would become a world-famous standard and popularize a style of music called bossa nova (Portuguese for "new thing"). "The Girl from Ipanema" ("Garota de Ipanema") won a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1964, beating out stiff competition from the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night," and Barbra Streisand's "People," among other huge hits. The musicians who recorded it, Stan Getz and João Gilberto (on the landmark album Getz/Gilberto), remain the hallmark artists of the style.

Bossa nova is derived from the samba and its rhythms are syncopated, which means that many of the offbeats are accented. The main function of the guitar in bossa nova is to accompany a voice or another instrument. There are many great players today who play this style on solo guitar, but in this lesson we'll focus on the accompaniment role of the guitar, breaking down the bossa nova rhythms to better understand them and then bringing them up to tempo. Bossa nova is usually played on a nylon-string guitar, but a steel-string should suffice, if that is what you have. Guitarists with basic fingerstyle chops won't have much of a problem with the elements of bossa nova backup.

When listening to this style of music played by the masters, you'll notice that the voice or solo instrument will seem to be floating freely over a solid rhythmic foundation provided by the guitarist. That is the essence of bossa nova: smooth and free—yet subtly determined.

Breaking Down the Beat

To get the feel of bossa nova, we need to first subdivide a measure into four groups of four 16th notes:

Most bossa tunes seem to be in 4/4 time but some are in "cut" time (4/4 time played at double speed) or 2/4 time. By breaking the measure down this way we will see how to play on the correct part of the beat. Playing "off" the beat is a trademark of this style; you will play more offbeats than onbeats with the fingers of your right hand.

Your right-hand thumb will almost always play on the strong beats (beats one, two, three, and four in 4/4 time). A common pattern begins by playing with both the right-hand thumb and fingers on the first beat of the bar. While the thumb continues playing on beats two, three, and four, the fingers play selected offbeats. That pattern may be repeated for a few bars before changing to a new one, or it may be used for an entire tune.

Let's start by looking at a common bossa rhythm for the right-hand fingers:

Right-hand bossa nova rhythm

The noteheads with X's show which 16th notes to play with your right-hand fingers. Set your metronome to 200 beats per minute or so, with the metronome clicking on every 16th note. Begin by tapping the rhythm with your hand on your knee or a table. When you feel comfortable with this rhythm, continue the same pattern, but now tap your foot on the beats indicated by the X's on the downstemmed quarter notes:

Complete bossa nova rhythm

This indicates where the thumb will play. It may take a little practice, but once you get it down you will start to get a good feel for the independence you'll need to develop between your thumb and fingers.

Now try this rhythm on the guitar. Example 1 shows the previous rhythm with a typical bossa chord voicing. Note the standard classical abbreviations for the right-hand fingering: p for thumb, i for index finger, m for middle finger, and a for ring finger. The thumb (p) will play the fifth string on the same beats you just tapped with your foot, and the fingers (i, m, and a) will play on the fourth, third, and second strings respectively. Keep using the metronome, if needed. For now, the chords played by your right-hand fingers should ring through until the next chord is played. Later, when you get a feel for the rhythms, you can experiment with damping certain chords within the pattern. In Example 1, for instance, try damping the very first chord in the pattern with your right-hand fingers, immediately after plucking the strings.

Example 1
Example 1 (played slowly)