21 GROOVE GREATS Play your best rhythm ever!
Jon Bishop looks at the world of groovy rhythm guitar. From funk and soul to disco and pop and everything in-between, this is a broad overview of the guitarists who created some of the most appreciated songs of the past 60 years.
Groove guitarists from Prince to Steve Cropper, Nile Rodgers to John Frusciante can teach us loads about becoming a better rhythm player. Improve your accompaniment skills today!
Welcome to this exclusive lesson looking at the pop, funk, soul, and disco rhythm styles that have powered the charts for over half a century. The aim of this lesson is to provide you with some core techniques and concepts to help you build a good vocabulary in many rhythm guitar styles. Whether you’re ‘into’ funk and soul or not, all these ideas are easily transferrable to other genres.
The rhythm guitar is often one of the key instruments in pop music and can be heard popping and chinking away in the background of some of the biggest-selling records of all time. We have used 21 groove masters as inspiration for our studies, and created an eight-bar mini piece for each. We have also split these 21 guitarists in four groups.
Group one is entitled Iconic Artists, and features Prince, Curtis Mayfield and Nile Rodgers. Prince and Curtis Mayfield’s back catalogues speak for themselves. Typically their tracks feature quality groove guitar parts delivered by the great men themselves. Nile Rodgers was the driving force behind Chic, Sister Sledge and many more. He’s also a big-time producer and has collaborated with the likes of David Bowie and Duran Duran.
Group two is Band Based Groovers, and features those guys in the engine room of the big labels but whose names have too often been overlooked. Guitarists like James Brown’s, Jimmy Nolen had a disciplined approach, laying down well-constructed parts and never straying from the path. Al McKay of the incredible Earth, Wind And Fire is one of the great funk guitarists and even had his own
Star Licks instructional video in the mid 1980s. Artist’s like Booker T and the MG’s, and Otis Redding benefitted from the legendary licks of the great Steve Cropper.
Group three is The Studio A-Listers, and features those session guys that played for platinum selling artists, day in day out. David T Walker was an excellent groover who played for the likes of Marvin Gaye and The Jackson 5. David Williams created superb guitar parts on Michael Jackson’s early solo albums. It’s also worth looking out for Cornell Dupree who played for artists like Bill Withers and Aretha Franklin. Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin) played on huge songs like Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On, The Temptations’ Papa Was A Rollin Stone and many others.
The final group showcases The New Generation which features Vulpeck’s guitarist Cory Wong and Snarky Puppy’s Mark Lettieri.
At the heart of the GT audio you’ll find 21 eight-bar tracks in the style of some of funk, pop, soul and R&B’s biggest names. Many useful techniques and concepts are laid out for you to peruse and incorporate, including funky octaves, single-note popping lines, syncopated 16th-note strumming, muted scratch stokes, playing on and off the beat, fretting-hand muting, finger slides and hammering-on to chords, to name a few.
There ‘s also four funky backing tracks with all of our notated performances removed. We’d recommend digesting and learning as many of the examples as you can, as a change of feel can make them eminently usable in blues and rock styles - even country. Why not challenge yourself to come up with rhythm parts of your own using our examples as jumping-off points along the way?
“The aim of this lesson is to provide you with some core techniques and concepts to help you build a good vocabulary”