Accent Percussion
Accent Percussion
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Accent on Ensembles, Bk 1: Percussion (Accent on Achievement) £1.30 Accent on Ensembles is an exciting book of duets, trios and quartets for flexible instrumentation that correlates with Accent on Achievement, Book 1. Use these ensembles to develop confidence in young players and as a valuable resource for music during co… |
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Accent on Ensembles, Bk 1: Mallet Percussion (Accent on Achievement) £1.30 … |
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Accent on Ensembles, Bk 2: Mallet Percussion (Accent on Achievement) £3.73 … |
Two Huge Tips For Creating Interesting Guitar Strum Patterns
Ever find yourself banging out the same old rhythms on your guitar but can’t figure out how to get out of that rut? There’s a couple easy ways to take those bland old strum patterns and turn them into something new and exciting.
Let’s face it, there’s only so many rhythms out there. Only so many ways to combine quarter notes, eighth notes, and sixteenth notes. And they’ve all been done. But you’re only using a tiny fraction of them in your playing. Rather than go searching for the next great rhythm, we’re going to take the ones you already know and tweak them to be cool again.
Our two tools? Accents and Ghost Notes.
Let’s start with accents. Accenting a note means playing it louder than you would normally. And for the most part we accent the first beat of the measure. And while James Brown built his entire musical legacy on “the one”, we’re going to branch out a little bit today.
Let’s take a measure of straight eight notes: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
Normally we’d accent the 1, with a lighter accent on the 3. But what if we did something Like This.
1 & (2) & 3 (&) 4 (&)
The “()” will be used as our accent marking. In standard notation, it’s marked with a “>” above the note. By accenting your strum on the 2 and the &’s, you’re going to create a different groove even though the rhythm itself is the same. Let me give you a little selection of grooves that use this same rhythm, but end up being different styles.
1 (&) 2 & (3) (&) (4) & – Afro-Cuban
(1) & 2 (&) 3 & (4) & | 1 & (2) & (3) (&) 4 (&) – Frevo (Brazil)
(1) & 2 (&) 3 & (4) & | (1) & (2) – Marcha (Brazil)
Now, if you start taking all the other rhythms You Know and changing the accents around, you’ll have a whole new variety of grooves.
Let’s take a look at ghost notes. A ghost note is a muted, percussive sound made by plucking a dead string. One of those things that, when you’re first learning, we try to avoid like the plague. But now we put them to good use.
We’ll use our same measure of eighth notes as an example. – 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
Pick out a couple of beats and mute your strings when it comes up. Here’s an example:
1 & x & 3 & x &
You can mute as many or as few as you’d like. A good way to experiment with this is to use just one mute, but try it out on every note. Then use two and find all the combinations of that. As you get to three mutes the combinations will start to become very numerous.
Here’s some stock groove examples:
1 x & 3 x & – Baion (Brazil)
(8th note triplets) 1 x a x x x 3 & x x x x- Adowa (Ashanti)
(16th notes) 1 e x x 2 e x a 3 e x a 4 e x x – Funk
Could those ghost notes be rests instead? Absolutely! Space and silence are your friend in music. They let the music breathe. So don’t be afraid to not play on a beat.
Take this all one step further. If you’re a metal guitarist, how could you take some of those Brazilian or African rhythm ideas and use them in the context of metal? If you’re a country guitarist, couldn’t you also use those same ideas and adapt them to your genre. You bet you can. And if you keep playing with these idea, you’ll run across rhythm guitar feels by happy accident instead in a book.
And so while our combinations of rhythm notes can see limited, the combinations of those with accenting, ghost notes, rests, partial chords, fingerpicking, and dynamic changes give you a seemingly endless variety of rhythms to bang out of your trusty guitar.
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