The One Simple Secret to Great Rhythm Guitar with Adam Levine
► Watch the full lesson on YouTube
Great rhythm guitar comes down to one simple idea, and it's borrowed from the drums. If you treat your strumming hand like a drummer, the groove takes care of itself. Here's the secret.
What you'll learn
- Treat your strumming hand like a drummer — the guitar is basically a drum
- A drum kit: bass drum on 1 & 3, snare on 2 & 4, hi-hat subdividing the beat
- The secret to groove: accent beats 2 and 4 (lock to the snare)
- Add eighth-note down-up strums while staying conscious of 2 and 4
The guitar is a drum
One of Adam's first instruments was drums, and the guitar is literally a drum — if you think of your strumming hand the way a drummer thinks, the same elements come into play: good time, a steady pulse, and most importantly where and how you accent so the part has a groove or a pocket.
A drum set has three basic elements. The bass drum generally lands on 1 and 3, the snare pops on 2 and 4, and the hi-hat subdivides the beat into eighth notes, sixteenths, or triplets.
Accent beats 2 and 4
The secret is to lock into the snare — beats 2 and 4. Take a G chord and strum every beat evenly and it sounds flat. Now strum a little harder on the second and fourth beats and it immediately starts to draw you in and groove.
From there, play eighth notes — down, up, down, up — while staying conscious of where 2 and 4 fall (one-and, two-and, three-and, four-and). That one simple device of accenting the second and fourth beats is the basic of all basics for getting into the pocket. Once you have it, everything else you add sits on top of a real groove.
