How To Play Rhythm Guitar for BEginners

It takes time and practice to become a good rhythm guitarist, and it’s important to put that work in. Unfortunately a lot of new guitar players focus on playing lead guitar, but in reality, when you’re playing live or with your friends, 80% of what you play is going to be rhythm guitar.

Keeping that in mind, being a good rhythm guitarist can set you apart from the crowd. If you’re a great rhythm guitar player, people are going to enjoy playing with you and enjoy listening to you. That means you’ll be the one to get the gigs.

The goal of the Rhythm Guitar Quick-Start Series is to give you a solid foundation and the key things you need to know as a rhythm guitarist. By the end of this series, you’ll be better at playing live, playing with your friends, and learning new music.

Just so you know, it doesn’t matter if you’re playing with an acoustic or an electric for this series. All of the skills and tips I’m going to teach you are equally important to both types of guitars.

As we go through this series, we’re not going to focus too much on theory. Since this is a Quick-Start series, I want you to focus on getting your hands on your guitar and practicing the most important skills as a rhythm guitar player.

We’ll go through power chords, bar chords, open chords, and some of the most important chord progressions you’ll need to know as a musician. After that, we’ll focus on your strumming hand, look at the most common strumming patterns you’ll need to know, and work on your timing too.

The first thing we’ll go over is power chords. We’ll learn shapes for your power chords and how to move the chords all around the guitar neck. After that, we’ll move on to bar chords, where I’ll give you tips to keep them from being too frustrating.

As a rhythm guitarist, it’s important for you to know all of your open chords, so I’ll teach you the essential chords you’ll need to build your chord library. Once we get these essential chord shapes down, we’ll learn some of the most important strumming patterns. The strumming patterns I’ll teach will become building blocks for more advanced strumming patterns, so you’ll want to feel very comfortable with these basics.

The guitar is an ancient and noble instrument, whose history can be traced back over 4000 years. Many theories have been advanced about the instrument's ancestry. It has often been claimed that the guitar is a development of the lute, or even of the ancient Greek kithara. Research done by Dr. Michael Kasha in the 1960's showed these claims to be without merit. He showed that the lute is a result of a separate line of development, sharing common ancestors with the guitar, but having had no influence on its evolution. The influence in the opposite direction is undeniable, however - the guitar's immediate forefathers were a major influence on the development of the fretted lute from the fretless oud which the Moors brought with them to to Spain.

The sole "evidence" for the kithara theory is the similarity between the greek word "kithara" and the Spanish word "quitarra". It is hard to imagine how the guitar could have evolved from the kithara, which was a completely different type of instrument - namely a square-framed lap harp, or "lyre".

It would also be passing strange if a square-framed seven-string lap harp had given its name to the early Spanish 4-string "quitarra". Dr. Kasha turns the question around and asks where the Greeks got the name "kithara", and points out that the earliest Greek kitharas had only 4 strings when they were introduced from abroad. He surmises that the Greeks hellenified the old Persian name for a 4-stringed instrument, "chartar". The earliest stringed instruments known to archaeologists are bowl harps and tanburs. Since prehistory people have made bowl harps using tortoise shells and calabashes as resonators, with a bent stick for a neck and one or more gut or silk strings. The world's museums contain many such "harps" from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilisations. Around 2500 - 2000 CE more advanced harps, such as the opulently carved 11-stringed instrument with gold decoration found in Queen Shub-Ad's tomb, started to appear.A tanbur is defined as "a long-necked stringed instrument with a small egg- or pear-shaped body, with an arched or round back, usually with a soundboard of wood or hide, and a long, straight neck". The tanbur probably developed from the bowl harp as the neck was straightened out to allow the string/s to be pressed down to create more notes. Tomb paintings and stone carvings in Egypt testify to the fact that harps and tanburs (together with flutes and percussion instruments) were being played in ensemble 3500 - 4000 years ago.At around the same time that Torres started making his breakthrough fan-braced guitars in Spain, German immigrants to the USA - among them Christian Fredrich Martin - had begun making guitars with X-braced tops. Steel strings first became widely available in around 1900. Steel strings offered the promise of much louder guitars, but the increased tension was too much for the Torres-style fan-braced top. A beefed-up X-brace proved equal to the job, and quickly became the industry standard for the flat-top steel string guitar.

At the end of the 19th century Orville Gibson was building archtop guitars with oval sound holes. He married the steel-string guitar with a body constructed more like a cello, where the bridge exerts no torque on the top, only pressure straight down. This allows the top to vibrate more freely, and thus produce more volume. In the early 1920's designer Lloyd Loar joined Gibson, and refined the archtop "jazz" guitar into its now familiar form with f-holes, floating bridge and cello-type tailpiece.

The electric guitar was born when pickups were added to Hawaiian and "jazz" guitars in the late 1920's, but met with little success before 1936, when Gibson introduced the ES150 model, which Charlie Christian made famous.

With the advent of amplification it became possible to do away with the soundbox altogether. In the late 1930's and early 1940's several actors were experimenting along these lines, and controversy still exists as to whether Les Paul, Leo Fender, Paul Bigsby or O.W. Appleton constructed the very first solid-body guitar. Be that as it may, the solid-body electric guitar was here to stay.

No matter what we’re working on, I always think that applying everything you’re learning on guitar to real music is really important to helping you grow as a musician. Throughout this series, I’ve provided you with a couple of jam tracks that you can use to play everything we’re working on. That will make it a lot more fun than just using a metronome.