吉他扫弦

Hi. This is Hub Guitar.

A big part of ear training is learning to recognize rhythms and then to play them on your guitar. So let's take a quick look at how to convert rhythms into guitar strumming patterns.

The key to picking this up is to remember that down beats are down strokes, and up beats are up strokes.

The first example is just four/four-- that's common time--and we'll play four straight beats. Since these are all down beats or quarter notes, we'll hit them all with a downward stroke, too. I'm going to use a C major chord as an example.

Now let's add some upbeats in between the notes. If you think about it, my hand had to come back up after every down stroke. So now I'm just going to use the pick to play the strings on my way up, too.

Now that we've got this basic grid established, we can start adding rests to create more interesting rhythms. A rest is a rhythm that's not played. So if I turn the third downbeat into a rest, I'm going to skip over it. You can use your voice to mark the missing beat; many players find that to be helpful.

So you need some way to measure the rhythm and compare it against what you're playing. Don't be shy about tapping your foot, tapping your hand on something, or just pronouncing those rhythms like I did verbally.