We all struggle to play songs and one of the root causes is usually rhythm. I paraphrase – as Gershwin said, “If you haven’t got rhythm, you’ve got nothing”.
This lesson brings everyone (specifically players who are new to our rhythm series) up to the same point of knowledge and practical playing for our upcoming final Rhythm lesson in a few months’ time. If you’ve already attended one of these it’ll act as a fantastic review – lots of fresh material in it.
If you fancy Sweet Home Alabama, We are the champions or Annie’s Song – come along and learn to play them with a great groove!
Overview
This lesson reviews our previous Read Rhythm courses and is formal preparation for our upcoming final Level 3 course. It’ll be great revision for those who have already been on our Level 1 and/or 2 and is a should-do lesson for anyone coming into this course series for the first time.
This course is suitable for players of most levels as it’s about the strumming hand more than the fretting hand but it would be useful to have tried basic barre chords to get the most out the song section examples and exercises.
Although covering the same subjects in Levels 1 and 2, the materials for this preparatory course have been totally refreshed including a rhythmic analysis of an eclectic mix of songs: Sweet Home Alabama (Lynyrd Skynyrd), Annie’s Song (John Denver) and We are the champions (Queen). By the way this prep course is an excellent energiser for maybe tackling the whole of Sweet Home Alabama as a dedicated course.
Rhythm is the pulse, drive, groove and feel of songs – it’s that one element that gets your foot tapping. An audience would instinctively know if you’ve got it! If you want to play along with others, or simply just improve your own playing, you need rhythm – it’s an essential skill to be able to read it and, as importantly, apply to the guitar.
In levels 1 and 2 we learnt note names and values and their equivalent rests for whole notes/semibreves, half notes/minims, quarter notes/crotchets, 8th notes/quavers and 16th notes/semiquavers. We then went on to look at dotted rhythms and the following time signatures 4/4, 3/4 and 6/8. As part of this, we’ll revise counting, Time Signatures, reading rhythm notation, practising with a metronome, etc. We’ll also explore listening to rhythm patterns and writing them down.
You should come armed with pen and paper (and have a metronome to hand for home practice!).
What you get
Learning rhythm requires lots of home practice and hence the materials are as important as the actual lesson. This course includes:
Buying options:
In addition you can purchase the extensive original materials for the previous two courses (both of which were two lessons long):
Level 1:
Level 2:
Call us for a chat at any time
Whatever level you are, you’ll have lots of takeaways to work on later. If you’d like to go through the course please call or email.