How To Master Rhythm Guitar Playing - Supercharge Your Beat Sub Division [With Adam Levine]
![How To Master Rhythm Guitar Playing - Supercharge Your Beat Sub Division [With Adam Levine]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9POKJG6N8kI/maxresdefault.jpg)
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Rhythm guitar really comes down to one thing: dividing the beat. Master that — and the secret of where to accent — and you'll play with the kind of pocket that makes people move.
What you'll learn
- Clap and accent on beats 2 and 4, never 1 and 3
- Rhythm guitar is dividing the beat — into 2 (eighths), 3 (triplets), and 4 (16ths)
- The pocket secret: accent beats 2 and 4 no matter the subdivision
- Use the shuffle strum — a triplet with the middle note left out — and ghost notes for feel
Dividing the beat
It drives musicians crazy to see people clap on 1 and 3 — the groove lives on 2 and 4. Everything in rhythm guitar comes down to dividing the beat, and Adam approaches the right hand like a drummer (the guitar really is a drum).
Take a quarter-note pulse — 1, 2, 3, 4 — and practice dividing each beat: into two (eighth notes, "one-and, two-and"), into four (sixteenth notes, the "Good and Plenty" rhythm), and into three (triplets — "one-trip-let" or "blueberry"). At first, just get really good at matching the beat exactly, with no flamming — no notes landing a hair early or late.
The secret to the pocket
Here's the near-secret to a real pocket: whatever your subdivision, accent beats 2 and 4. A beginner plays a flat, even "one-and-two-and" with no accents. But if you're strumming eighths — down, up, down, up — and you lean into the downstroke on beats 2 and 4 every time, the part suddenly has punch and sits in the pocket. Practice it against a metronome so you can hear exactly how you line up with the quarter-note pulse.
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Triplets and the shuffle strum
Triplets tangle guitarists up: if you strum down-up-down for a triplet, your hand arrives ready to go up just when the next beat needs a downstroke — like patting your head and rubbing your belly. You can play every triplet with all downstrokes, but that's rare outside slow tempos or old 50s doo-wop.
What we usually use instead is the shuffle strum — based on the triplet, but with the middle note left out ("one … three"). You play the first part, come up on the third, and that sets you up to come back down on the next beat. It sounds like a horse going over a wooden bridge. Train yourself to move freely between eighths, triplets, and sixteenths, then start ghosting and leaving out notes within a sixteenth-note feel — it's all just variations on dividing the beat.
For players ready to take this all the way, Adam lays out his complete professional system — rhythm, melody and harmony as one language — in The Method.
