Chords for How to Play Basic Bluegrass Guitar Rhythm, Part 1

G-Lick [D] I [G] _ bet I caught you off guard didn't I?
It's been a while since I've done one of them on camera anyway
How are you doing?
Banjo Ben here for BanjoBenClark.com. This is your home for instructional videos and tabs
for learning banjo
mandolin and guitar.
Today is the first video in a long series of
_ _ learning how to play rhythm guitar
And I'm really excited about this because rhythm guitar is one of my very favorite things to teach
It's something that everyone needs to know it's the most important part of your guitar playing
And I think I have a really great method on teaching you how to step up your rhythm guitar playing
it seems to be a mystery to a lot of people when you get to play in fast bluegrass and country and
Alternate rhythms, but when it's not going to be a mystery anymore
So let's look into the three chords that we're going to use for this first initial video
And then we'll jump into the exercise after that
The first chord we're going to use and talk about is just a three finger G chord
This is a bluegrass style chord though a lot of folks use it in country and in other genres
_ If you'd like a more detailed explanation of this chord
I invite you to watch my video on how to make a G chord and I'll explain everything you need to know about it
But essentially we have our middle finger down the low E string at the third fret
_ We're going to mute our next string the A string with the fleshy part of our middle finger
_ That we just get that thump [D] sound
Have an [G] open D and an open G string, but then down here with our ring finger
We're going to grab the third fret of the B string and then with our pinky the third fret of the high E string
So it sounds like this all together _
_ _ _ The next chord we're going to use is your standard C chord with our ring finger
We grab the [C] third fret of the A string middle finger.
We grab the second fret of the D string
_ _ _ Open [C] G string and then [G] our first fret of our B string down here [Em] with our index [C] finger
_ _ When we play that chord, we generally just want to play these last five strings not all six strings
The _ next chord that we're going to [Em] use in our exercise is our standard D chord
This really uses the last four strings of the guitar.
[D] We have that open D string
Then we're going with our index finger.
We're going to play the second fret on our [A] G string _
our ring is going to cover the [D] third fret on the B string and _
Then our middle finger is going to grab that second fret on the E string.
We're gonna play those last four strings all together _ _ _
It's uh, it's stuff now.
Let's jump into the exercise
_ When we're playing guitar rhythm
Essentially we are trying to be several different things at once
We are trying to be a drum set of sorts because we're keeping the rhythmic pattern going with our right hand while at the same time
Providing notes with our left hand combined with our right hand to tell people which chord we're on and a particular
Chord can be represented really in two different parts.
We've got our bass notes
Which is what a bass guitar would play a lot of [G] times sounds something like this
_ And
_ _ [Bb] Then we've got [G] our treble notes
Which is what like a mandolin would strum on and that's on the upbeat and the strum sounds something like this _ _ _
_ And so as rhythm guitarists, we're going to take combinations of both [D] of those things
Combine them together to make [Abm] the particular rhythm sound that we want now
Let's start off with this G chord that we talked about earlier that three finger G chord and we're going to start
This first exercise by playing a downstroke [G] on this low E string on that low G note
That's a G note as a bass note after we do that
We're going to do a strum through the last four strings of the guitar a very succinct
quick strum
_ through all four strings
[D] You can do that
_ _ Next we're going to reach [Em] and grab this [D] fourth string
_ Play a downstroke on it just by itself and then do the [G] strum again putting them all together.
It sounds like this
_ _ [D] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ [G] _ _ _
_ [A] _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [Em] _ _ [G] _ _ _
[A] _ _ [Em] _ _ [D] _ _ [G] _ _
[A] _ _ [Em] _ _ [D] _ _ [G] _ _
[A] _ _ [Em] _ _ [D] _ _ [G] _ _
[A] _ _ [G] _ _ _ _ [A] _ _
_ _ [D] _ _ _ _ [A] _ _
_ _ [Em] _ _ _ [G] _ _ _
[A] _ _ [D] _ _ _ _ [A] _ _
_ _ [Em] _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ [A] _ _
_ _ [G] _ _ _ [B] _ _ _