How to Play a Basic Rhythm _ Guitar Lessons

Yeah , let's talk about basic rhythm , right ?

You're gonna hear a lot of terms .

Maybe you remember some of them from grade school whole notes , half notes , quarter notes and then a special one called dotted half notes .

Let's start with whole notes .

So whole notes whole , right ?

We have to remember that because this equals four beats for us .

So all that means is I'm gonna play the first beat and let it ring 234 , right ?

And then I gotta do something else .

So 12341 , 23 , 41234 .

Right ?

So all I'm doing is playing our chords ge minor C and D right on the first beat and letting it ring for four .

So now I can break that in half , right ?

And that's called a half note .

So half of the hole .

So the hole used to be 4.5 is now two .

So all that requires is I'm gonna play every chord for two beats .

I'm going 12 , 12 or you can say 123 , four , right ?

One 234 or 12 , 12 .

All right .

The next one we could talk about is quarter notes .

So a quarter of the whole , the whole was four quarter is one , all that means is I'm gonna play on every single beat one two , 34123 4123 , 1234 .

And then last , let's talk about dotted half note .

Now the dot does something special to every note .

What the dot does is it takes half of the value of the note .

In this case , we're talking about a dotted half note , right ?

So half , if you remember is two beats , right ?

So we're taking half of that , which is one and we're gonna add it back to the original note value .

So dotted half note equals three beats , right ?

Two plus half of itself , one equals three beats .

And we're just gonna play a chord and let it ring for three beats .

One , 23123123123 .

And there you go .

Simple rhythm .