Okay! I want to show you how to play that. Now unfortunately, there’s not time in this mini lesson to show you that whole thing. There’s not time to show you this beat but there is time to show you this beat. I know, I know, I know what you’re thinking, you wanted to learn that beat as well, but it would just take too long to do all that in one go. So, I’m going to show you this rock and roll rhythm. And that’s really fun to play, and that’s a lot of fun, and you can get people singing along into that. And if you want to learn the whole “Johnny Be Good” song, then I suggest you go on to the website and find it on the archive, and there’s a whole full length video guitar lesson, where there’s time to explain the whole thing to you.
Okay, so let’s begin. I’m going to play this thing in slow motion through to you so you really understand what I’m doing. So it goes like this, now I’ll just give you a clue: Keep an eye on my right hand then you’ll see that I’m using palm muting to make it sound sort of chunkier, like I explained when we learned how to do power chords. Okay, so let me play it through to you so you can see what I’m doing. Okay, so that is known as a 12-bar sequence. You probably heard of the 12-bar blues? And really rock and roll and blues are cousins. Really blues is just a slower version of rock and roll. For example, that’s like a blues rhythm and then rock and roll, but the same thing but faster, like that okay. So, I hope you get the idea.
So, let me begin by explaining exactly what it is I’m doing. So, if you take your first finger and put it on the 4th string of fret 2, and what I’m going to ask you to do is to pluck the 5th string, and the 4th string, now of course the 5th string is open at this stage, so it will sound like this. Good and you can do that twice. Now what I want you to do is to take your 3rd finger and put it on to the 4th string at fret 4, now of course we don’t need this note anymore. I mean, generally I tend to actually leave it on there, but makes no difference, so we’re going to pluck the 5th string open now, and the 4th string at fret 4. And now I’m going to ask you to go back to fret 2 again. So I heard that makes sense if you join it together it should sound like this.
Okay, now what I’m going to ask you to do is play it twice. Okay, now listen carefully to me now, when you play it twice, that is one bar in length, because in music, we call the length of music, we measure it in bars and beats. Now I want you to remember that, that is one bar in length. Okay, now here’s the thing, I’m going to ask you to play 4 bars, so it should sound like this. Okay, I hope that makes sense, I think it does because you can see the numbers at the bottom of the screen. Now of course, if you speed it up, that will actually go by really quickly, so that’s the first 4 bars of the sequence, and that shape that we’ve just done, we’re going to call an A, and the reason for that is because the 5th string open is an A, and that is the root note. So, what we’ve done there is like a simple chord.
So now we’re going to move to a D and what that means is we’re going to move down a string, now the 4th string open is now the root note. And of course, the 4th string open is a D, and we’ve got our first finger now on the 3rd string of fret 2. And essentially we’re going to do exactly the same thing. Obviously, we’re plucking the 4th string and the 3rd string now. I’m going to ask you to play 2 bars on the D. Good. So up to this point we’ve got 4 bars of A, 4 bars of D. Now we’re going to move our finger back again, back to the A, so we’re now on the 4th string at fret 2 again, and we’re plucking 5th string open and the 4th string. So, that was 2 bars of A. Okay, I hope you’re following this all right. And if not, don’t worry, because I’ll run through it again in a second. So, what we’re going to do now is go to an E. And it couldn’t be simpler, you’re just going to move your first finger to the 5th string fret 2, and the 6th string is open, and of course, the 6th string open is an E. So you’re going to pluck the 6th string and the 5th string for 1 bar. Good, I hope you’re following this. And of course if you need to pulse it and just, you know, just catch up, that’s absolutely fine. But I’ll keep going for the second.
We’re going to the D again now for another bar. So, that’s the 3rd string at fret 2, and the 4th string open. And now we’re going to go back to the A for 1 bar. And then we’re going to finish on the E for 1 bar. Okay, now don’t worry if you haven’t memorized all that straight away, I wouldn’t expect you to. But you might have noticed that, that adds up to 12 bars. So let me talk you through that again. We got 4 bars of A. Very good, and it might be worth any point to know, you might have noticed I’m using palm muting. Remember, we learned that when we learned the power chords on touching gently with the palm of my hand. Just on the strings, a little bit, enough to dampen the notes. Because otherwise, if we didn’t use the palm muting, it would sound like this, and it don’t quite sound as cool, okay. So, we’ve done the 4 bars of A, just to refresh your memory, on to 2 bars of D. Back to 2 bars of A. 1 bar of E. 1 bar of D. 1 bar of A. 1 bar of E. Okay, I’m going to play you this now a little bit faster, so. And you can see that it sounds really cool once you get it up to that speed. So, it’s going to take a bit of practice for you to get it like that. You know, don’t you expect to get it perfect straight away; it took me a long time to practice and get it that smooth, okay.
So be patient with yourself, I’m going to play it now full speed so you could really get a feel for the energy. Now, I spiced it up a lot there. I put a lot of extra notes in it to make it sound even more interesting but, you know you can work towards that, I want you to start simple, get the hang of that, and then you’ll find that once you’ve got it, everything else will start to flow. And all these other little interesting bits and pieces will start to come together, and make sense. So you know what you got to do now, you got to go now and practice it, and get it nice and smooth. Take your time. Be patient. Go and get on with it, it’ll be worth in the end, if you want to learn “Johnny Be Good” it’s on my website on vGuitarLessons.com, look on the archive and you can learn.
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