Three Big Ideas for Teaching Rhythm on Guitar

Good rhythm is obviously a fundamental skill. It’s also fundamentally human in that if you can walk, speak, and breathe, your body understands what a pulse feels like. It’s perfectly natural for anyone to feel the cadence of their step, or tap out regular beats on the table. Hand that person a guitar, though, and sometimes their entire sense of rhythm falls apart.

Guitar is ultimately a percussive instrument, and we can learn a lot from drummers. On both instruments, the tactile experience is the way we maintain control over the sound. When you strike a drum, or a guitar string, the way you hit it determines the way it responds. Experienced players get the sound they want by varying the attack, the way the object is struck. We learn to calibrate our touch based on the resistance of the string or drum head.

However, many students find they are so distracted by the mechanics and coordination required that any sense of rhythm goes out the window. Concentrating solely on fret hand placement can develop a kind of tunnel vision that only sees the “hitting the target” aspect of playing. Many rudimentary strummers navigate chord changes like an obstacle course, with each move creating a new wave of anxiety. Between the geometry of the chord shapes and the coordination of the two hands, there is already so much to process that the brain doesn’t have the bandwidth left to concentrate on keeping time.

1. Developing “feel” as literal feeling

But what if we don’t need to think about keeping time? If rhythm is something we fundamentally feel, we should be talking about “feeling“ the beat, right? Indeed we do, but for some students it feels like an abstract instruction.

It might seem odd for “feeling“ to be an abstract concept. But given how much time I spent counting as a music student, it’s not hard to understand how one might come to think of rhythm as being purely mathematical. There is mathematics involved, of course, in that we are dealing with groups and subdivisions along a timeline. But that timeline is organized and articulated by a pulse, which is not an abstraction but a sensation.

Our drummer has to coordinate four limbs instead of the guitarist’s two. Obviously, there is more coordination required to balance four moving parts. But there is also an advantage in engaging all four limbs: a stronger awareness of the core that connects them.

All musicians learn to feel the beat with our bodies. This comes more naturally to some people than others. Some people feel a beat naturally, to the degree that some of us were chastised in kindergarten for being unable to sit still! With musical study and experience, we learn to use that internal beat as an experiential reference. Instead of counting the timeline, we feel cycles and patterns. The ability to do this naturally is part of the gift of the musically talented, but it’s something anyone with a body can learn.

In applying this idea to strumming, we find a built-in bonus. Swinging the arm articulates an eighth note subdivision, while rocking the wrist articulates sixteenths. Best of all, the movement aligns with the natural accents. A downstroke is an arrival on the downbeat, while an upstroke is an upbeat pickup.

“Downbeat” and “upbeat” are basic rhythmic concepts, but they are not mathematical abstractions. All you need to do to prove this is walk across the room. Your foot hits the floor on the downbeat, and lifts on the upbeat. You don’t need to march in strict time to feel this. When we translate this mental picture to strumming a guitar, the movement aligns with the sensation.

Once we’ve established this connection, ask the student to nod their head or rock their upper body in time with the beat. Tapping the foot works equally well, but you might find that some people will have a harder time with this. Rocking the body puts the sensation in the core, making the beat much easier to feel.

2. Don’t teach “strums”, teach rhythm.

Many students will come in asking to learn the “strum pattern” for a song. The strum pattern is the sequence of down and up strokes that create the rhythm, and you’ve almost certainly seen these expressed on the internet as a series of D’s and U’s.

This is a simple enough way to break things down, but it also creates its own problem. First of all, without rhythmic notation the letters themselves don’t give you the rhythm. One can be very careful and specific - for example, using eighth note stems to articulate the eight subdivisions of a 4/4 bar. But breaking a strum down this way also has the unintended effect of separating the movements from their context.

If every downbeat is an arrival and every upbeat a preparation, we can’t fully absorb a rhythm by just swinging the arm. The steady movement of the hand provides the context for the pattern. A sequence of D’s and U’s is just a set of unconnected movements.

A more helpful approach is to begin by replacing down and up with “out” and “in”. Thinking of down and up strokes suggests that the strumming hand moves back and forth along a plane, more or less parallel to the face of the guitar. But with a few exceptions, relaxed strumming involves a rotation of the forearm. The movement is not a plane but an arc. A downstroke is a flick outward, and an upstroke is a natural return to the starting position.

This small mechanical adjustment has a huge impact. It allows the upper arm and shoulder to relax and support the movement rather than drive it. It makes the attack and therefore the tone softer and easier to control. It reinforces the natural accent of a downbeat with gravity behind it. Perhaps most important of all, it bypasses the upper arm muscles and allows for a more direct connection between the fingertips and the core.

A strum pattern then becomes a dance, a fluid movement with an associated sensation. Dancers know that fluid movements start at the perimeter of the body, at the extremities. Fingertips and feet lead the direction, and the rest of the body follows. The muscles of the arms and legs are conduits for instructions from the brain, not obstacles to be overcome. Too much focus on the strumming arm creates a block, a muscular barrier between brain and fingers. But a nodding head and bouncing fingertips will make an easy and direct connection.

3. We play with the whole body.

Some people can connect to this kind of bodily awareness more easily than others. Athletes and dancers understand it. If you’ve ever practiced yoga or Pilates, core awareness is an essential part of the picture. Anyone that has ever worked to improve a tennis serve or a golf swing has experienced the challenge of a mental disconnect between intention and the resulting movement.

This disconnect is especially challenging for long-term beginners. I work with many students who have played for years without progressing beyond a rudimentary level. They’ve learned enough to have developed patterns of muscle memory, for better and for worse. The same phenomenon that allows them to form the chords comfortably is creating an obstacle on the other side. Muscle memory cuts both ways, in that once a pattern has been ingrained it becomes automatic and difficult to change.

Muscle memory can’t be dragged kicking and screaming to a new place. But it can be sidestepped, by practicing new slow movements that don’t trigger the automatic response. Replacing the down-up model with out-in is a great way to start this process. Rhythm work away from the guitar can provide excellent reinforcement. Tapping with the hands and feet, speaking the rhythms in nonsense syllables, and singing while keeping simple time on muted strings all help develop the sense of inner pulse. Strengthening the sense of inner pulse makes it easier to coordinate movement against it.

Ultimately, strumming a guitar IS a kind of dance. Asking the student to stand so they can feel their feet helps reinforce this, and I encourage my students to practice standing up. This makes whole-body awareness easier to access, taking them a step closer to what I see as the ultimate goal: not to strum the guitar but to dance with it.