Right Hand Rhythmic Variation

In this lesson we'll explore a classic trick, where you delay one of your upbeats to create a dramatic sounding “stumble” within the groove.

You start with the same downbeat just like before, but then we leave out the following downstroke and follow that silence with the regular upstroke. The rhythm is “1 (e and) a”, and after that it's just business as usual.

This can work really well at the top of a new section, for example a chorus or a verse, but if you use it more than just once it can get really distracting and alter the basic groove too much. Let's try it in a simple example.