 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and I'm here with MGRMusic.com and in this video today we're going to learn three essential rhythm guitar techniques as part of our miniseries on being a great rhythm guitar player. So in the previous video we talked about the different note lengths and the theory of what makes rhythm. If you haven't already checked that out please go check out part one and then come back to this video because the techniques we apply in this video uses the theory from part one. The first thing we're going to talk about is alternate strumming. This is super important and in our lead guitar tips video we also talked about the importance of alternate picking. This is very true if you're strumming as well. So when we're strumming we want to be going down and up at the same time. We talked about this very briefly in part one of this series where we talked about eighth notes and sixteenth notes because we're playing more notes across each beat we need to be doing down and up strums. So if you're new to alternate strumming we're going to talk about a couple of exercises you can do to get your wrists loosened up and your down and up strumming sounding very equal and even. So the first thing to do is pick a chord. I'm just going to play a G chord for this but you can use whatever chord you want. Start off by strumming eighth notes. So from part one of the video that's one and two and three and four and so that's a down on the beat and an up on the end. Start off nice and slowly. Starting off slow just allows your hand to get used to that down and up motion. You don't want to be too tense when you do this because you don't want to drag the up pick across the strings. Most guitar players always say that it feels quite strange the first time they start strumming upwards so like I said take your time with this go nice and slow. Once you get comfortable with that motion then you can start to bump up the tempo. A really cool exercise you can do to start getting used to doing down and up strumming with different rhythmic groupings is to play eighth notes on the one and the three and sixteenth notes on the two and the four. So going one and two and a three and four and a so there's a lot of alternate strumming needed for this. The second technique we're going to talk about is fret hand muting. This is when we intentionally use our fretting hand to create muted notes. So we can do this by just lifting the hand up or resting it across the strings. So if I just rest my fingers across all six strings I get this percussive sound. Now usually when we're learning chords this is seen as a bad thing but we can actually use this to good effect in rhythm. We can create interesting riffs and different rhythmic patterns using these percussive hits. So here's an example of a nice simple one to get you started. So for this pattern I'm just using a G and an E major chord. I'm playing the one and the two as down strums and on the three and four I'm doing eighth notes across both beats three and four and but those are muted hits. So once I've played the two chord hits I'm dropping my fingers across the strings like this and playing those percussive notes. Then I'm moving to the E chord and repeating. So here's another rhythm idea that uses these percussive hits. I'm going to play a three chord rhythm now G, D and C. I'm going to play eighth notes on the one and the three of each bar and I'm going to do sixteenth note percussive hits on the two and four. So for that I was playing the G on the one and and then four percussive hits on the two. Then I'm doing the same thing for the remainder of the pattern. So the D is being hit on the three and with percussive notes on the four then the C I'm sticking on for the whole bar. So I'm doing eighth notes on the one and three muted notes on the two and four. So let's just play through that one slowly and once again up to full speed and the final technique we're going to look at is palm muting. Now this is a great rock technique which involves muting the strings with the palm of our fretting hand. So first of all you need to work out where your palm mute is going to occur. It's always at the point where the string comes over the bridge saddle so depending on what type of guitar you play this can be in a slightly different place. On this guitar it's just this point here where the string comes out of the body and it goes over the bridge saddle. If you're playing a Les Paul style guitar it will be on the part of the bridge with the intonatable saddles and if you're playing a Strat or a Telecaster it would be a similar arrangement to this where the strings come out over the bridge saddle that way. So you need to get the palm of the hand the soft bit right here right on top of that bridge saddle. What you should hear is a deadened version of the note that you're playing so if I just do this with the open low E string I can hear the pitch of that note. If my hand is too far forward this is going to happen and if it's too far back so what my hand to land on that point exactly where the string comes over the saddle so I get that deadened version of the note. So we're going to learn a power chord rock riff that uses some palm muting. So I'm going to use three power chords for this so I'm going to use the power chord here on the seventh fret of the A string with the nine on the D and G the fifth fret on the A with the seventh fret on the D and G and the fifth fret on the E with the seven on the A and D. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to play eighth notes on the chord on the one and three and I'm going to do four power muted notes on the two and four as sixteenth notes. So once again I'm hitting the power chord on the one and and then on the two E and I'm dropping my palm onto the bridge I'm playing those palm muted notes then I'm doing the same thing with the fifth fret power chord on the three and then the fourth beat then I'm going to the fifth fret on the E string for the next power chord I'm hitting that on the one on the second beat I'm doing those palm muted notes again then I'm doing the same pattern across the third and fourth beat and then the fourth beat so the tricky thing here is getting your palm on and off that palm mute you're going to be coming off when you play the power chords and on when you play the chord so here's that slowly so take your time with that one it does take a little bit of getting used to especially when you're coming on and off the bridge for palm muted notes and chords that aren't palm muted so there you go guys there are three rhythm techniques that you can combine with the theory knowledge from the first part of this series in the next video we're going to be breaking down some classic rhythms that use all this theory knowledge and all these techniques that we've learned so brush up on those ready try and come up with some of your own mcpatterns that use both combinations of the theory stuff from the first video and the techniques we've just learned in this video if there are any riffs you guys want to suggest for the breakdown video next week please throw them in the comments of this video so we can check them out in advance we'd love to hear what riffs you guys want to learn between now and the time we break them down next week thank you guys so much for watching i hope you've enjoyed this lesson please let us know down below in the comments what you did think and like i said if you see this ahead of us doing the riff breakdown video please throw your suggestions down below in the comments don't forget to go check out blackstar amplification on youtube for more free video lessons just like this and if anyone out there is looking for a guitar teacher please head over to mgrmusic.com and check out the network of teachers all over the country waiting to help you guys out thanks so much for watching and we'll see you soon