What To Do When You Are Stuck In A Rut With Your Rhythm Guitar Playing

By Simon Candy

Have you ever been, or are you right now, in a situation where you have become stale with your guitar playing?

Every time you pick the guitar up to play, you find yourself using the same old chords and strumming patterns. You may even pick out some notes in the chords, but the sound is getting stale and boring all the same.

This is a common frustration that can lead to one quitting guitar playing altogether.

However, with the right approach, anyone can learn to sound good on guitar, even surprising themselves when picking the instrument up to play.

In this article, I am going to focus on rhythm guitar playing and how you can literally develop endless ways to approach it, giving your playing loads of variety.

No longer will your guitar playing feel or sound dull, predictable, and boring

How To Master Your Rhythm Guitar Skills: Strumming

Let's begin with strumming.

Strumming is an everyday skill you need to know, and while learning patterns seems like the logical thing to do, there is much more to it than that.

Learning strumming patterns is important, but is only 1 step of the process, not the whole process in and of itself.

In addition to learning patterns for strumming on guitar, you also need to learn how to apply them in a dynamic fashion so they sound musical, as well as the ability to ad-lib your strumming and not be restricted by patterns.

Watch the video below, to learn how to sound better strumming through various dynamic approaches:

How To Master Your Rhythm Guitar Skills: Picking

An alternative to strumming is to pick notes out of the chords you play.

Let me give you an example of how to train this rhythm guitar concept into your playing so you can use it wherever you like with freedom.

Here is a typical chord progression you are likely to come across:

and here is one of many ways you could play this progression using a chordal picking approach:

Now most people will stop at this, and as a result every time they use a chordal picking approach in their guitar playing, this is how they will do it, and this is how it will sound.

You don’t want that, because pretty soon you are going feel like you are in a rut with your playing every time you go to chordal pick something on your guitar because you will do it in the same way.

Let me give you another way you could pick this same chord progression:

Now you have two ways that you can pick through these chords. This will start to develop some variety in your playing so you sound much better.

To train this even more into your playing, so that it becomes something you can do effortlessly whenever you want, you need to combine the previous two approaches into one like this:

Combining these two approaches trains even more variety into your chordal picking skills. You are learning more possible combinations in regard to patterns to pick and will sound much better on guitar when using this kind of rhythm approach in your playing.

Finally, let's apply this technique to another unrelated chord progression like this:

Application is a vitally important part of training and mastering any guitar skill. Taking the rhythm concepts you come across in the songs you play and applying them to other musical situations is crucial in developing great guitar rhythm playing skills.

How To Master Your Rhythm Guitar Skills: Strumming And Picking Together

Combining strumming with picking is something you do a lot of the time when playing rhythm guitar.

Sometimes it’s more strumming with some picking, other times it’s more picking with a little strumming.

There are many possible combinations.

Check out this video where you learn 5 steps to strum and pick your guitar with ease:

To learn many more essential rhythm guitar concepts so that you can develop endless ways to play and never get stuck in a rut again, check out this free mini course for developing your rhythm guitar chops