Having Trouble Hearing Rhythm Guitar in Music? Try THIS!

Hey, guitar enthusiasts. Welcome to lesson five of my rhythm series. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about how can you actually hear different intricacies of strumming in songs? So let's get into the lesson.

Now, students ask me all the time, how do you hear? And it's hard to hear when there's a band going on. So a lot of times when I'm creating rhythm for songs, a lot of it goes off what I feel, but there are certain things that I can hear a lot of times. So take a song like Wonderwall. If you guys want to go listen to that. I'll put the lesson up there. Very, very intricate strumming, but I can hear the rhythm. I can hear the strumming. If you can hear the guitar, you can sometimes hear it very well. But sometimes when there's a lot of bands, like, if you listen to a lot of Eagle stuff, sometimes they have a lot of guitar. Guitar players. So it's hard to tell which guitar is doing what. So you do the best you can. And sometimes we have to figure out strumming patterns for songs that don't even guitar. How do we do that? So the biggest thing. Again, working on ear training. Okay. Training your ear to hear things. Now, the guitar has a very different sound. When you hit a down strum versus an up strum. Can you hear the difference? What do you hear?

So a down strum has way more attack than an up strum. It also has a darker sound because usually, you know, by the time you get to the bottom, you might not always hit that bottom string, but you always hit the bottom string on an up strum. So up strums have a more tinnier sound because oftentimes you don't catch the top bass notes. See if you can hear the difference. I'm going to strum slowly. Here's a down strum. Upstrom. Downstrom. Upstrom.

It's very slight. You might be like, Lauren, I can't hear a difference at all. And that's okay. You may not be able to hear this difference in the beginning, but I want you to hear it. I'm going to use a brighter sounding G. Let's see if you can hear it now.

Can you hear it now?

Hear the difference? The up strum is much brighter. So when I'm trying to figure out what strumming pattern do I use for a song? I. I first start with the foundation. Are we in 3? 4. Are we in 4? 4. Okay. We went over that in an earlier lesson, how to figure out. If we're in 3, 4, or 4, 4, we gotta know what number to count to. Then I will listen. I'll just say, okay, if I can find an acoustic version of a song, I like working off acoustic versions because it's all guitar. You can hear it very well. But if I'm working off a song with a band, I'll say, okay, can I find the drum line? Can I find the rhythm? And I'll count that rhythm. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. Okay, I found the rhythm, and now I need to know, do I hear anything between each of those counts? So let's take a rhythm like we did before. Let's take 1, 2, and 3 and 4. Let's take that rhythm. Okay, so here we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 4.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Okay, so let's do it again.

1, 2, 3.

Okay, so I want you to listen. I'll play it a little bit slower. You'll be able to hear where the up strums are. I want you to try. I'm going to play it in a loop so that you guys can figure this out. But listen for the up strums.

Okay? And I'll use that brighter G again.

Okay, so if you can't hear it, close your eyes. Close your eyes and see if you can hear it. Ready? And I just want you to count to four. I want you to go 1, 2, 3, 4. I really want you to focus on that downbeat, and I want you to listen for. If you hear something between the beat. All right, ready? 1, 2, 3, 4.

Okay, so if you listen to that rhythm and you were really counting, you would hear nothing between beat 1 and 2. You would just hear 1, 2. And you would hear nothing between beat 4 and 1 4.

1.

But you would hear something between 2 and 3 and 3 and 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. So that just automatically tells you there's up strums. Okay? That's what the. This is. I know. I'm. I'm oversimplifying it. It can be hard to hear these things in the beginning. But again, if you can get the foundation of what you hear, because there's also things, strumming patterns and notations called 16th note strumming patterns, which means you have to listen for the things that fall in between the eighth notes. We're not going to do that here in this lesson, at least I might continue the series. We'll see. Or you can go do the strumming course, and you'll learn all about 16th notes there. I do a lot of 16th note strumming there too. But that's what I want you to do. I want you to listen to. Can I hear something between the beat? Because if I hear something between the beat, then I know that there's an up strum in there. Okay, so that's point one. Another thing that you can commonly hear in songs. There's a lot of songs where. Remember I told you the snare drum falls on 2 and 4. You can almost hear the accent of the 2 and 4 on the guitar. Like a song like chorus with no name.

They have this very. I mean, that's more of like a shuffle rhythm, which we're not going over. But you can hear the 2 and 4.

So you can do accents. So that's something to listen for. Do I hear something snapping out louder? 1 and 2, 3 and 4.

So you'll hear that a lot in music. That accent on the 2 and 4. So pay attention for that. Something else that you might hear strumming pattern wise, particularly in rock music. You might hear something called palm muting, which is. The chords don't sound like they're ringing through for some reason. They almost sound muffled. Think of a song like Heartigle.

Hear that?

It's just an eighth note pattern. Instead of doing down up, we're doing all downs. But I'm using a technique called palm muting.

And that's how you get that effect. So see if you know what to listen for. You can start hearing things in music and in rhythm. Something else you can listen for crescendos starting soft. Again, it's just an eighth note rhythm. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. But we're getting louder as we go.

And that's how they create that effect. Okay, so that's what I want you to do with your rhythm. Take a song that's more acoustic, go listen to it and see if you can hear the rhythm. Okay, I'm going to play a bit of a song. So this song is someone else's. So if I get hit with copyright, I might have to cut this section out, but hopefully I don't. And it stays in here. So it's going to be Tracy Chapman, Fast Car. And I'm gonna listen because this has finger picking. All right, there's not really a big drum line. There is some drums, but I want to go over. If I were going to listen to this, how I would figure it out. All right, so here we go. Now there's finger picking. There's not really a lot of drums here. There is a little bit. They must be using brushes on like a snare drum because I can hear them. And I'm going to try and lock in with that. Okay. Just to find what is my rhythm. What's the rhythm here?

Okay. I don't feel like I can sway with this song. Right. So that tells me it's in 4, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, three, four. Can you hear it?

Okay, that's. That's the intro. So we found the rhythm, but this is more finger picking. I'm going to fast forward us to more of the chorus section here. Hey guys, real sorry. I'm here editing this video because YouTube actually blocked the content for me using the Tracy Chapman song. So I'm going to have to cut out a short section of this video but I'm going to jump right into the next section which is actually me demonstrating the song and hearing the rhythm. And this is the great thing about singing too, because a lot of the vocal melodies for follow the chord changes. I think it's. This one actually has a capo and I think it's an E minor to C. I think.

It'S actually C to E minor. So we've got.

Her voice is following the chord change. So sometimes you can listen for rhythm. If you can't hear the guitar that well, you can listen to the vocal melody for rhythm ideas. Alright, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to play an acoustic version of this song and see if you guys can hear the changes. So let's get our rhythm first. I just want you guys to get the tempo because I'm going to do some intricate rhythms here and I want to see if you can keep the time. The most important thing about rhythm is can you keep time? 1, 2, 3, 4. That's our rhythm. 2, 3, 4. 1, 2. Remember, we would jump.

Did you guys hear the changes a little bit better that time. I'm going to count it through this time and see if you guys can hear it in that little hop that came in. So we got 1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2. And 1, 2, 3, 4.$1, 2. And 1, two, three, four. 1, 2, 3, four.

Could you hear it that time? I'm going to play it one more time through. Listen. Can you hear the chord changes? Are you noticing that when I switch chords, that first down strum is very intense. It's almost like I'm. I don't know if I'm doing it intentionally. To help you guys and kind of accenting that. First down. Remember I said down. Strums have more attack. Listen one more time. Let's see if you can hear. Can you anticipate when the chord change is coming? Can you hear when the chord change happens? There's a lot going on here, but this is a good test for you guys. 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4.

So there you go. That is an acoustic version. I know there was a lot of strumming going on there, but the key is, can you find the timing? Because if you can find the timing, guess what? Now we can throw one of our little strumming patterns in. Let's just try 1, 2, 3 and 4. It's not going to sound as good as my strumming pattern, but there's a lot going on. So we've got. Remember when we were one?

Not bad.

That worked pretty good. So, see, I just took a strumming pattern I showed you earlier and I just threw it into the song. Did it sound as great as mine? No, but it worked. And you notice on those C to E minor, those hop rhythms, I just.

Went down, down, up, three, four. 1, 2, 3 and 4. 1, 2 and 3, 4. 1, 2, 3 and four. 1, 2, 3and 4 and.

Or maybe I was doing 1, 2, 3 and 4. I don't know which one I was doing. But.

Whatever rhythm you want to choose, you can see. Just pick one, throw it in the song, give it a try, see how it sounds. You need to start hearing rhythms. The more rhythms you use, the more you start listening for things and hearing things, the better of a rhythm guitar player you will become. Hey, guys, I hope you're enjoying the rhythm guitar series. Just so you know, I do have a full strumming course. So many people ask me, like, I know chords, I don't need your beginner course, but I really need help with strumming. So if you're one of those people, you feel like you know your open chords and you're doing pretty well, but your strumming is really struggling. You might want to go check out the strumming course. I'll put a link in the description below. See you guys soon.