Hey rhythm strummer! I bet you know this tune.
[Demonstration]
You know how this song does, we can only do in 30 seconds on this on these free lessons. But I'm going to save it a little bit for later, the way it use all up. But I’ll show a great technique that I have for playing this just a single person on an acoustic guitar.
So there’s a technique called “palm muting.” It helps you do kind of percussive thing with the guitar, when you’re the only instrument there, but you want to have a little bit of the feel of drums and the whole band. And we do things like this it’s using the right hand to make these both to cut up things and to make extra sound like--
[Demonstration]
You could see how this could be used in lots of different songs. So let’s just try this simple pattern that I'm playing here. I'm just playing eight chord, D chord, A chord, E chord, and what I'm doing, though is I'm playing-- if you check the strum pattern diagram right here. You’ll see it goes – we got arrows of -- sequence of arrows. The down errors are down strums, up errors are up strums, and you’ll notice that a few of them are in white. Those are ghost, meaning you don’t actually hit the strings, but your hands keep going. You just don’t hit into the strings on them. And you see one of them has a dot over it that means it's staccato, and the way we’re making it staccato is with palm muting. Palm muting involves with this part of your hand, just gently put it on the strings and you notice that the strings are vibrating when you do this, they stop. So that’s the sound that you get.
Now there’s a whole technique library lesson on palm muting at rythmsdrummer.com. So you might want to take a look at that if you want to know more about it. But here, we’re just going to do this one thing with palm muting, which is cutting off this chord, and then we also do a movement that’s very much like the palm muting, but it's [Demonstration], I let my fingers kind of flat on the pick card to make a percussive sound like a snare drum. So we get--
[Demonstration]
Now, I'm playing what’s on the strum pattern diagram. So I'm playing down, up, down and then muting with my palm to make that staccato. Then the next one I'm moving my hand up not hitting the strings. The next one I'm not hitting the strings either, but I am that in my hand hit the finger board, so that’s what W means, it means you’re going to whack the finger board. I will whack that pick cards. I know it's—we have a name for these things.
Then we continue playing an up strum and down strum and four, which is where the chord has changed. And then we do the same pattern again with A and E. So let’s try doing this real slow, so here we go, nice and slow staying on the A chord.
[Demonstration]
Now don’t worry if you don’t get that right off. I’ll tell you, I didn’t get at the first time I tried it either, so let’s work on that. But let’s try adding some chords to that. Each measure of this can have two chords, of course, we change on the one beat and the three beat, but you notice the three beat, we’re not actually playing. So the first time you’d hear the chord that’s changed, is on end of three. And so friends if we play A and D in one pattern you’d hear [Demonstration]. That makes sense? When I went—was right when I changed chords. It seems that can take a little extra time changing chords, which is nice, so with A and D it we’d go--
[Demonstration]
Let’s try that a bunch of times just those two chords that measure--
[Demonstration]
That’s great. Now let’s just continue that with two measures in the second measure we’ll make our two chords be E minor and D. So we could go A-D-E minor-D. Want to try that? So--
[Demonstration]
So that’s the rhythm part for “Louie Louie.” It would also work for lots of different songs. If you want to know more about how to play “Louie Louie” you should check out the Rhythm strum our lesson on “Louie Louie.”
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services