While the acoustic guitar is less commonly associated with rock than the electric, the acoustic has always had a strong presence in this genre—whether as a songwriting tool or the bedrock of a recording. These lessons cover a range of styles — from oldies and classic rock to punk, funk, and the pop of today.
Blues and rock are two styles that are heavily intertwined, and the rhythm pattern in Example 3 instills more of a bluesy sound into your rhythm simply because it’s a common rhythm pattern in blues tunes.
If you’ve explored my Acoustic Rock Basics lesson “Soloing with Pentatonic Scales,” you’ll notice that the major scale encompasses the major pentatonic and adds two more notes: the fourth and seventh of the key.
Monotonic-bass fingerpicking, in which your thumb keeps playing the same bass note instead of alternating between two or three notes, is common in acoustic blues but works great in folk and rock, too.
Many of the best licks and riffs by artists like the Beatles and Neil Young are really just made up of bits and pieces of easy chord shapes. You can use these same basic chord shapes to create cool riffs for your own songs.
