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.

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Learn the Bo Diddley Beat

Learn the Bo Diddley Beat

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.
Andrew DuBrock with guitar

Monotonic-Bass-Patterns

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.

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Andrew DuBrock with guitar

Laid-Back Modern Rock Groove

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.”
closeup of hands playing an acoustic guitar

A Classic Blues Rhythm Pattern

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.

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