Acoustic Rhythm Guitar Mini Course - Day 2
Guitar Chord Picking - Chord Picking Patterns For Your Rhythm Guitar Playing
Now that you have some cool bass note picking patterns you can use in your acoustic guitar rhythm playing, lets now look at some guitar chord picking approaches to our progression.
Guitar chord picking means to simply pick the notes in the chords you play separately rather than strumming them together all the time. It will add an air of sophistication to your acoustic guitar playing and can make what you play sound much harder to do than it really is.
In todays lesson I want to take it a step further though. I will show you some cool chord picking patterns that you can use in any musical situation you may find yourself in when playing chords, however, I will also show you how to train this into your guitar playing so it is something you can use with absolute freedom whenever you want. This is really what you should be aiming for when learning anything on the guitar.
So lets kick things off with the first guitar chord picking pattern. Here it is:
Notice that the picking pattern in the example above is almost identical for each chord. The note you start on will depend on the chord itself, as I am targeting the root note. Be sure to follow the alternate picking to correctly develop this technique.
Here is another chord picking pattern we can apply to our progression:
This pattern is almost the reverse of what was happening in the first example, with the higher notes of the chord picked followed by the lower notes.
How To Train Guitar Chord Picking Into Your Everyday Playing
Both these patterns for picking chords on your guitar sound good and can be adapted to almost any musical situation. However, I want to show you how to train this technique into your playing so that you can literally apply it on the spot, in real time, to any chord progression you want.
A very effective way to do this is to simply alternate bars between the two picking patterns you have learned so far like this:
We now effectively have a new picking pattern for our chord progression. However what is great about this is that it also reinforces the first two patterns as well as train variety into your playing.
If you take each picking pattern you learn from various songs and rotate them with the ones you already know, you will soon have the ability and freedom to easily mix and match these to create your own patterns for chord picking on the spot, in real time.
This is far better than just simply knowing a bunch of patterns you can pick through in isolation.
I will leave you today with one more picking pattern for our chord progression that is a great one for targeting strings due to the large skips required to play it. Check it out:
After becoming familiar with the pattern above, you should of course then add it into a rotation with the previous patterns. Here is an example of that so you are very clear on how to do this:
Time To Put It Together
As you complete each part of this acoustic guitar rhythm mini course I want to briefly give you an example of tying the things you are learning together.
While I wont go into great detail about this here, it is perhaps one the greatest things you can do for your own guitar playing that will give you MASSIVE results!
So without further ado, here is an example of applying some bass note picking with chord picking to our progression:
You will do your technique wonders by learning the example above very well.
Compare the above chord progression back to what you started with in this mini course:
What a difference a few simple rhythm techniques can make!
Tomorrow you will learn some new and cool sounding versions of the chords in our progression to add even more excitement and variety to your rhythm guitar playing. Until then work hard on the things we have covered so far.
Songs With Examples Of Chord Picking:
- Hotel California by The Eagles
- Sweet Home Alabama by Lynard Skynard
- House Of The Rising Sun - The Animals
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