Following the theme of master classes from legendary guitarist today I am going to share with you this great video where Nile Rodgers delivers some great funk guitar playing.
Amazing stuff, great quality video as well, very clear and quite easy to follow!
In this video I explain how to approach right hand technique to have a better ‘swing’ when playing jazz solos…obviously this works well for any style of music that has back beat (blues, rock and so on…). The idea is to PICK the note on the UPBEAT and SLUR the note on the DOWNBEAT, using hammer-on, pull-off or sliding to the next note. As I show in the video, this is not to be done constantly, but with taste, mixing it up to create a lot of different rhythms.
The goal here is to be able to accent every possible 16th note in a very simple strum pattern. Of course the accent will happen in places you would not usually put it, so at the beginning, this might feel a bit odd. You will realize right away that this exercise will give you more control over your right hand strumming.
I advice to mentally count the 16th notes in this way:
1-e-&-ah, 2-e-&-ah, 3-e-&-ah, 4-e-&-ah
where 1,2,3,4 are your beats in 4/4 bar.
So the first exercise will put an accent on your ‘1,2,3,4’
The second exercise will put an accent on the e’s of every beat
The third exercise will put an accent on the &’s of every beat
The fourth exercise will put an accent on the ah’s of every beat
In better words, you are playing an accent on the 1st, the 2nd, the 3rd and the 4th 16th note of every beat.
Good luck!
