Rhythm Guitar Basics 3 (Guitar Lesson BC-156) Guitar for beginners Stage 5

How are you doing? Justin here.
In this lesson we're going to be checking out
a "blues shuffle rhythm".
Now, hopefully you've checked out the previous lesson on triplets
and you're kind of comfy
with the idea of counting triplets,
cos if you're not,
you're going to find this lesson little difficult.
So go and check it out if you haven't.
So, what is a blues shuffle?
Well, first of all I'm just going to play you
a little bit of a shuffle rhythm,
so you'll kind of get an idea of what's going on.
It sounds kind of like this:
...
You use it for blues.
...
It's that kind of thing.
It's a real chink-kaa, chink-kaa,
chink-kaa, chink kind of feel.
Now...
officially...
what a swing is
and what a swing is in or shuffle...
swing and shuffle are generally synonymous,
you can use whatever term you want,
there are slight differences,
but not that I want to go into it just right now.
The degree of shuffle is something
that you can learn by listening.
You can do it kind of mathematically if you want,
but remember:
the more you think about this sort of stuff,
the more you stink.
You really have to just listen to it,
let it become kind of instinctive
and get playing it.
We've already talked about triplet as being a count,
being 1 trip-let, 2 trip-let,
3 trip-let, 4 trip-let
which of course,
if you think of each triplet as being one, two, three,
it's kinda going one, two, three;
one, two, three;
one, two three;
one, two, three.
And what we're going to do to get our blues shuffle
is we're going to miss out the middle one,
which is the count of "trip"
or would be the "two", if we were counting
one, two, three; one, two, three,
that kind of thing.
So, first of all I'm going to explain the triplet version.
So if we are going:
1 (trip)-let,
2 (trip)-let,
3 (trip)-let,
4 (trip)-let,
you can see that I'm missing that middle one.
So if I'm playing wise,
I'll be using down strum on the beat,
the 1, 2, 3 and the 4,
and up strum on the "let" part of the "trip-let"
So we have:
1 (trip)-let,
2 (trip)-let,
3 (trip)-let,
4 (trip)-let,
1 (trip)-let,
2 (trip)-let,
3 (trip)-let,
4 (trip)-let.
Now...
I'm doing it with 7th chords,
you can do it really with whatever chords you like
but actually lets do it,
have a little bit of a go
at doing this nice and slowly together.
So, I'm gonna play a G7 chord,
nice stretchy one for you,
make sure you get your fingers working properly,
....
Sounds like this.
So I'm gonna give you three-four-in
and then we're just going to be doing:
1 (trip)-let,
down (....)-up,
down (....)-up,
down (....)-up
each time.
Just do it really slow, so off we go:
3 (trip)-let,
4 (trip)-let,
1 (trip)-let,
2 (trip)-let,
3 (trip)-let,
4 (trip)-let;
down (....)-up,
down (....)-up,
down (....)-up,
down (....)
Keep going. -up
1 (trip)-let,
2 (trip)-let,
3 (trip)-let,
4 (trip)-let;
Keep going.
up,
1 (trip)-let,
2 (trip)-let,
3 (trip)-let;
1 (trip)-let,
2 (trip)-let,
3 (trip)-let,
4 (trip)-let.
Keep going.
1 (trip)-let,
2 (trip)-let,
3 (trip)-let,
4 (trip)-let.
1 (trip)-let,
2 (trip)-let,
3 (trip)-let,
4 (trip)-let...
And we'll finish there, I think.
So, this is the idea here,
you should just be trying
to play along really nice and slow,
get used to the dooh-kaa-kaa, dooh-kaa-kaa.
Now, kind of weird thing about it
is that your hand has to pause after the down stroke
and with all of the other rhythm stuff that you're doing,
it's really, really, really important that your hand doesn't stop moving
this is the one example, where
it kind of it does need to have a little bit of a pause.
Although, that's a kind of...
just for now you get a real feeling of the pause.
As soon as you start to speeding it up,
and you kinda get a:
...
As soon as it's little bit faster,
you don't have that feeling of a pause.
So don't worry about it,
it's not like it's ok to pause,
it's not.
You just change the kind of the feel,
it becomes kind of more "flicky".
But for this early stage,
you just try to play it really straight,
get used to the idea of:
1 (trip)-let,
2 (trip)-let,
3 (trip)-let,
4 (trip)-let.
Once you feel really comfortable with that blues shuffle rhythm,
I want you to try and apply it
to the three different 12 bar blues sequences
that we have in the common chord sequences section of this website
and also any blues song
that you might know or like to learn.
So, we're just going to be using all of the dominant chords
that we've learned so far.
The one that we're going to do now is just...
I'm gonna get you to have a...
listen to a blues in E,
all of the way through with the shuffle rhythm
and after you've done a bit of practise on it
nice and slowly,
you might wanna come back
and have a bit of a play along with this one.
So, we're just gonna be using
E7, A7 and B7 chords.
Check out the common chord sequences
for the right chord progression here.
So, here we go,
two, three, four:
. . .
And again:
...
Ok, we haven't done those last couple of chords.
but hopefully you can play along with all of that,
get the chink-kaa,
chink-kaa,
chink-kaa
happening.
It's really good fun to play this kind of blues
and you'll find there are hundreds and hundreds of blues songs
that use the simple 12 bar blues chord progression.
If you got your shuffle rhythm down,
that's a whole big heap of tunes
that you can play just with that little bit of information.
So, hope you've had a little bit of fun with that
and I'll see you for another lesson very soon.
Bye, bye!