Your Online Guide to Playing Better Jazz Guitar
Rhythm Patterns for Jazz Guitar
When studying improvisation, many of us focus on learning chords, scales and arpeggios, as well as how these structures relate to each other in a musical fashion. While having a strong grasp of harmony and melody is important to develop a solid improvisational palette, there is often one key ingredient that is missing from our practice routine, rhythm.
One of the easiest ways that I’ve found to add rhythm to your practice routine is to think of rhythms as things, such as a chord or scale, and not just as an abstract concept. For example, instead of thinking about playing eighth notes or quarter notes, think of specific groups of eighth notes, as we would any melodic motive such as a scale fragment or arpeggio. Example 1 shows a group of 4 eighth notes that come together to form a rhythmic cell in the first two beats of the bar.
Example 1
Once you have your motive picked out, the key is to solo using only this motive, see Example 8 for an example over an F blues.
Take any chord, chord progression or song that you’re working on, and try to improvise a solo using only one rhythm, in this case 1&2&. This is trickier than it sounds, and the hard part is to keep the rhythmic motive going for 10 to15 minutes during your solo, while maintaining a level of melodic and harmonic interest so that you don’t get bored.
You’d be surprised at how much your melodic ideas will open up when you focus on one rhythm; forcing you to be more creative with your lines to avoid becoming monotonous.
Now that you have your rhythmic motive (this can be any combination of notes such as 3 eighth notes, a quarter note and 4 sixteenth notes, two eighth note triplets, whatever you can think of) you can move it around the bar in order to create more rhythmic interest, in the same way that you would move a lick or pattern around a scale to create melodic interest. Example 2 shows how this idea can be played starting on different points within the bar.
Example 2
With this motive firmly in place, you can now go one level deeper by adding accents to each note in the motive. This means that you’ll play one of the four notes louder than the other three, which is indicated by the little arrow above the different notes.
Examples 3 to 6 lay out the different accents that you can use with a four-note motive, including all the rhythmic variations discussed in Example 2.
Try to focus on one accent first, say the first note of the example, and then push that around to the different starting points within the bar. Once you can do that, then move on to accenting the second note, then the third and so forth.
This will not only help you develop your rhythmic playing, but it also raises the level of control in your picking hand, something this is also often ignored in our practicing but that is found in the playing of countless great guitarists.
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5
Example 6
You can also add another layer of interest by removing one of the notes in your rhythmic motive and replacing it with silence. In Example 7, you can see what the motive will look and sound like if you take out the first note.
Once you’ve experimented with this, try putting a rest on the second, third and fourth notes, as well as adding accents to the different notes and pushing them around the bar as in previous examples. By doing so, you’ve created an endless number of rhythmic possibilities to add to your playing, and you did so with only one rhythmic motive!
Example 7
Try coming up with your own rhythmic motives to practice, adding accents, moving them around the bar and adding rests as you’ve done here.
Remember, practice at a slow tempo, there’s no hurry to learn this stuff. It’s always better to go slow and fully ingrain these ideas than to rush through them and not internalize them properly. One properly learned musical idea is worth more to your playing than a thousand half-learned concepts.
In the final example, I’ve written out a one-chorus solo over an F blues using the first rhythmic motive, with an accent on the third note throughout.
It’s not the most musically interesting solo, but with practice you can take these ideas and insert them into your playing in the moment, raising your solo to the next level and beyond.
Example 8
Matt Warnock Guitar on Facebook
Are you on Facebook? If so, follow the Matt Warnock Guitar Page and enjoy these great benefits:
- Monthly giveaways of free ebooks, skype lessons and more
- Access to Exclusive Lick of the Day Posts
- Access to exclusive video lessons that aren't found anywhere else on the web
- Be the first to get the latest articles from my site
- Be able to ask me questions about jazz and jazz guitar and get in-depth and prompt responses
- Participate in the weekly Reader Question Article discussion
- Connect to other jazz guitarists in an interactive way
Click to visit the Matt Warnock Guitar Page on Facebook and give it a like while you're there!
No related posts.
13 Responses to "Rhythm Patterns for Jazz Guitar"
Leave a Reply
30 Days to Better Jazz Guitar
Get Your Copy Today!
Rhythmic Fundamentals Ebook
Get Your Copy Today!
This is awesome. Why doesn’t more Jazz pedagogy work on this kind of stuff.
Thanks so much for your lessons.
J
Thanks Jason. Everyone seems to practice and teach harmony and melody in jazz but often leave out rhythm! Thinking that it is something we either have or don’t have. But for me rhythm is a thing just like a chord or scale that we can practice and improvise with as we would any arpeggio or lick.
What’s funny about that is that no one seems to put emphasis on the rythm. But after seing a couple of masterclass, i can say that most of the great players place it as the first fundamental, before harmony and melody.
Thank you ever so much for this lesson!
I’m struggling with my soloing, I know some arpeggios and scales, but my solos always come out sounding weird and I think this is a great way to improve my phrasing, big thx!
Very cool John, glad you dug it and these rhythms could help expand your solo ideas!
I really love these Rhythm lessons!!!
Bom de mais!
Outstanding! This also reminds me of how to properly read rhythms, i.e., not as isolated notes strung together, but as words, i.e., reading 2 beats as one continuous phrase, so that one bar of 4/4 is comprised of two distinct rhythmic patterns instead of a series of isolated notes. It’s like reading “cat” as a single word “cat” and not as “C + A +T”. Of course, I’m not surprised how many musicians do not get beyond musical kindergarten. :)
Thanks Nav, this type of stuff is really important, especially if we can break things down and practice rhythms as we practice scales, that really helps get this stuff internalized.
You consistently do a good job of breaking things up into fundamental elements that are readily practiced. I appreciate your diligence and approach.
Thank you!
kengon
No problem man, thanks for checking out the sie and article!
Another great article. I think it’s a really beneficial exercise.
Thanks Tom, yeah I’m big on rhythmic stuff, it’s a great way to expand your playing without learning any new harmonic or melodic material, just approaching things differently from a rhythmic angle.