Lauren Bateman teaches rhythm guitar using a metronome set to 60 BPM. She walks through whole notes, half notes, and quarter notes over a G-Em-C-D progression, emphasizing counting to four as the foundation for timing.
Hey, guitar enthusiasts, welcome back. In the first lesson, we learned about whole half and quarter notes. If you didn't catch that video, I'll put a link up here because we're moving on to lesson two, where we're going to work on some application.
All right, so hopefully you guys have got down a little bit the whole note, the half note, the quarter note. So what I usually do with students when we're working on timing is I put everything to a metronome. Now, a metronome is just a click, and it's a track that basically keeps tempo. Tempo is the pace. Think of it as like miles per hour or kilometers per hour, depending on where you are in a car. And all it does is a click. Watch. So this is set to. I'm going to set it to 60. 60 is like the seconds in a clock. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3,4. Now, the great thing about a metronome is, is that it really makes you focus in on your timing and your rhythm. Okay. The bad thing about a metronome is it's very robotic. So sometimes people feel like they feel very robotic instead of fluid with their rhythm. And that's okay in the beginning. You will develop the fluidity with time. But what we're going to do is we're going to start this exercise by doing a little metronome work with some of those rhythms we just learned in the first lesson. And. And then the second half of this video, we're going to play some chords, and I want you guys to work as a listening exercise to see if you can start hearing the timing of when chord changes are coming. Because when you're listening to songs and you're trying to figure out strumming patterns, you got to be able to hear where that next chord change is coming is the chord play for two measures or one measure or half a measure. We want to be able to hear those things. So. So first, let's start with the metronome exercises. So I'm going to keep this at 60 beats per minute. If you guys feel like this is too slow for, you can use the settings cog to speed it up. If you feel like it's still too fast, you can use the settings cog to slow it down. I'm going to be playing over chord progression G, E minor, C, D. If you know my simple four chords, you can do the. You can do the two finger chords, three finger chords. You can do my stuck like glue chords, whatever chords you want to do. But it's going to be G E minor, C, D. And we're going to be starting with whole notes. Okay? And I'm going to count this with you. Eventually I'll take the count away, but I want to count this with you because I feel it's very important for you guys to hear me counting. And I want you guys to count along with me so that you start understanding this timing and get a feel for it. All right? So first we're just going to listen. This is our tempo, all right? And it's going to click every single beat. Every beat, okay? But we're only going to play. We're going to strum for one beat, but we're going to let it ring up. We're going to do whole note strumming first. Okay, so here it is. It's going to be one, two, three, four. That's our rhythm. One, two, three, four. Starting on G2, three, three, four. Ready?
1, 2, 3, 4. And 1, 2, 3, 4. And 1, 2, 3, four. And 1, 2, 3,. And 1, 2, 3,4. And 1, 2, 3', 4. And 1, 2, three, three, four. And 1. Let's do it one more time to G2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4 dot 1, 2.
Now one time without me counting. Okay, we'll do it one more time without me counting.
3, 4. And.
You can keep counting if you want to.
Sometimes it's much easier to work off someone else's timing and the metronome. I do that in my, in my guitar course with my students. I play all the rhythms with me and the metronome. And this way you can work on your timing as you work your way through the course. So now we're going to do the half note rhythms. Okay? So it's going to get a little bit faster. We're going to stick with 60 beats per minute. Alright. It's pretty even kiltered. You know, most songs are within like the 80 to 120, 130 beats per minute range. So 60 is a pretty slower, comfortable speed. So we're going to do the same thing, except this time we're going to be doing half notes. So it's going to be strum, strum. So you're going to strum every other click. All right, so here we go. We got one, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four. 1, 2, 3, 4. One, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2.
As my voice cracks here again.
1, 2, 3,4. 1, 2, 3, 3, 4. 1, two, 3, 4. Now without me counting.
Awesome. Awesome. So hopefully you're getting a feel for these rhythms now. Getting a feel for Timing, just counting to four. There's other rhythms that, that we'll talk about, but right now we're just focusing on four beats per measure. This is really the foundation of rhythm. I really want you guys to get this inside and out, because if you can hear the foundational rhythm, you'll be able to build rhythms off of that. But you got to start with a solid foundation. So we're going to move to the last rhythm we learned, which was the quarter notes, Four down strums. Okay, so now we're going to be doing four down strums for every chord. Again, I'll play the chord progression through twice. G, E minor, C, D with me counting, and then two without me counting. All right. And you can keep counting at home if you want to, but I'm going to stop counting to see if you can keep your timing going. Okay, so we got one, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four. 1, 2, 3, 4. One, 2, 3, 4. 1. 1, 2, 3,4. 1, 2, three, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. 1, 2, three, four. One, 2.
Now I'm stopping, counting. Ready? And one.
There you go.
So people ask me all the time, lauren, do you always do the counting all the time? And eventually, no. For certain things, I do still have to count depending on how the rhythm is. But something like this, it almost becomes like a meditation for me. And I can feel at this point when four beats has gone by, I don't really need to count. I can just feel. My body instinctively knows time to change, time to change, and you'll get to that point enough. But you need to put enough time into doing stuff like this to get the rhythm ingrained. Because one of the biggest things students ask me all the time, like, my timing is horrible. How do I fix my timing? You have to focus on the foundation. If you can't count to four and stay in time, how are you going to expand? How are you going to start playing some really intricate rhythms if you can't maintain just the baseline? So what we're going to do in the next lesson in this series is we're going to listen to some songs, and I want you to see if you can count it out with me. And hear, hear when chord changes are happening. See if you can hear the rhythms and what's going on. We're not going to figure out any rhythms yet. I just want to work on, can you hear when a chord change is coming? Can you hear when something different happens in the rhythm? So we're going to work on that in the next lesson. And to get there, you can just click on over to that video.
