These articles are excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine’s instructional guide, Acoustic Rock Essentials.
Playing effective rhythm is more than simply learning how to strum along with a beat—it involves finding the unique groove that fits each song best, whether that’s integrating strummed passages with bass notes, palm muting, syncopation, accents, or other techniques.
You’ll also learn how related chords fit together to form chord progressions on guitar, create your own songs and transpose them into different keys, expand your major- and minor-pentatonic solos, and much more.
The so-called Bo Diddley beat, shown in Example 5a may seem difficult at first, but if you break the beat down into a 16th-note subdivision, you’ll find a 3–3–2 pattern in the first half of the measure that may help you get a handle on it.
A cousin of alternating-bass fingerpicking, monotonic-bass fingerpicking keeps your thumb on the same bass note, instead of alternating between two or three notes.
John Lennon added an interesting twist in the Beatles’ “Julia” by playing the same bass strings in the same order for each chord, regardless of which string held the root.
This pattern lifted from bluegrass boom-chuck rhythm alternates bass notes with strums, as shown in Ex. 2a. You can mix bass notes and strum patterns in many ways.
Strum through this pattern on one chord, and you can hear the verse rhythm behind the Strokes’ “Last Night,” the rhythm pattern behind Hall and Oates’s “Maneater,” or the recurring anthemic rhythm in the Doors’ “Touch Me.”
The steady eighth-note pattern is about as simple as they come, but it’s the consistent use of downstrokes that gives this rhythm pattern its character.
Some modern rock and pop tunes get a boost by injecting a laid-back groove with a 16th-note swing feel. Example 7a shows one common syncopated groove you can get with this feel, and Example 7b shows how you might embellish it to sound similar to Train’s hit “Drops of Jupiter.”
A great way to add a percussive pop to your rhythm patterns is to play scratch rhythms on beats two and four of each measure, simulating the sound of a backbeat snare drum.
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.
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.