Table of contents
Comprehension
Chords and their changes
Three important symbols
Picking or strumming
The C chord
The bass strings
Down & Up
Tom Dooley
Different rhythm patterns
Knockin` on heaven’s door
Bass accompaniment
Now we add the beat
We continue to expand
One-mil-lion-Dol-lar-jack-pot - the master strum with bass
1 + 6
THTTTHT
Songlist for the THTTTHT
Jeeeez
List of songs for the Jeeeez
Whiskey in the jar
Extravagant
Waltz
Waltz, part 2
Wild Rover, a waltz at its best
Rock`n Roll with C&O
C&O
Different versions of the same pattern
Streets of Philadelphia
Rocking all over the world
Hammering
The night they drove old Dixie down - Intro with Hammering
Sweet Home Alabama
If I had a hammer
Every breath you take
Christmas carols
Picking pattern no. 1
The bass picking for the picking pattern no. 1
Sailing
Tears in heaven
Tears in heaven, part 2
Picking pattern no. 3
Different patterns and their bass pickings
Bass pickings part 2
Bass pickings part 3
Emphasizing individual strings
Rock - folk - country
Bass runs
Bass run, part 2
Bass run with C F G
How about one more
That’s it for now
Imprint
Hello, my name is Christian Pahlke
Every beginner as a guitar player sooner or later wonders. I can play chords, but what next? Here is the answer. What you are looking for and need now is the rhythm (strumming and picking patterns).
A song consists of three components: a melody, the chords, and the rhythm. You know the melody of your favorite songs, you can find the matching chords on the Internet, so all you’re really missing is the rhythm.
With this book I’d like to show you those rhythms with which I accompany a lot of songs from many musical styles. Here, you won’t read anything about notes, musical scales, 3/4 or 1/16 time, triplets, fifths, thirds, amplitude or similar things. I'm not going to make this a musicology lesson. I will show you the rhythms that I gathered in a way that you can play them straight away and thereby can accompany endless amounts of well-known songs. At the beginning, the rhythms are partially converted into a counting method so that really every not-so-absolute-beginner can improve. Easy figures allow you to see at a glance what is important. All the interesting things are immediately visible.
If you can change chords without a problem then this is the right book for you. But if you still have to learn how to play chords then unfortunately this is the wrong book for you. You can find a lot of books in music stores that deal with learning chords. There, you can also find a lot of music books with texts and the matching chords. Here, you can easily apply these rhythms. I wrote this book so that you can continue right after having learned chords.There are easy rhythms like “Every breath you take" and there are complicated ones like Creedence Clearwater’s "Proud Mary". There are gentle rhythms like Peter Sarstedt’s "Where do you go to, my lovely?" and there are quite hectic but nevertheless really simples ones like Trini Lopez`s "If I had a hammer". There are rhythms for "La Bamba", "Country roads", "This is the life", "Bed of roses", "Oh Donna", "Silvia’s mother", "At the hop", "Keep on rocking me", "Young girl", "Summer Wine", "Indian reservation", "Sailing", "Black is black", "Summer of 69", "Sweet home Alabama", "Wish you were here", "Angie", "In the year 2525", "Let it be", "Love hurts", "I am, I said", "Easy living", "The air that I breath", "I was made for lovin’ you", "Let`s twist again", "Hotel California" and so on and on...
Comprehension
You should try to learn to understand rhythms. They all have their own melodies. It would be very helpful for you to develop a sense for it. The more this develops, the more confidently you can later correlate a song with a rhythm. This is exactly what I want to show you with this book in the first place. You should practically be able to figure out which rhythm, strumming, or picking pattern matches best to the song. There aren’t too many different options you see. It’s just that usually you don’t know how to proceed. But if you read through this book and the articles that interest you and learn the material then actually you shouldn’t have a big problem with it anymore. Rhythm is a matter of pure feeling. You can’t just rush through a rhythm and the necessary pattern without feeling it. It’s the same with dancing. Rhythms are nothing less than harmoniously balanced, concatenated sequences. So a matter of pure feeling. I will show you some nice rhythms and you will soon understand what you have to do: simply play, nothing more. And I will give you many hints which songs you can accompany them with. You can practice with these. Unfortunately, I can’t give you too many useful texts with chords and my rhythms all together. Almost all, with a few exceptions, underlie the copyright law. But this shouldn’t keep you from learning the rhythms anyway. There are plenty of texts with chords on the Internet, and many books available as well. If you accompany them with my rhythms then you have teaching material without end.
First, start to play and practice for a while, and once you’ve found the one or the other rhythm that works well for you then you should start to sing along. Changing chords fluently and learning the rhythms will probably be enough in the beginning. Please don’t be surprised if I sometimes write about rhythms and other times about patterns. This refers to the same thing. By the way, often several different patterns fit to the same song, but not always.
Chords and their changes
Often people ask me when to change chords. Well, on the one hand the chords are usually written above the corresponding text passage which you can find on the Internet or in books. At that point where the new chord is written, that’s where the old chord has to be replaced, it’s that simple. But sometimes neither the text passage nor the chord is correct, unfortunately. Then you should look for different versions of the song. That sometimes happens to the author because of different formats and programs that he or she is working with. But on the other hand at some point you must develop a feeling for the best timing when to change chords. That just happens to be a real matter of feeling, just like a rhythm.
That is why you should always start with really easy songs