In this article we'll see some tecniques to make simpler and...lighter our guitar parts.

Introduction

Guitar players spend most of their time playing rhythmic parts...even those who want to do solos for 95% of the time! The truth is that knowing how to play rhythm guitar is a fundamental knowledge for every guitar player.

One of the most severe difficulties we are facing when playing is effort: repeated series of chords, even a simple one, tends to tire out both hands. After a few minutes precision and accuracy start lowering, timing gets random and chords start missing: a bad situation indeed!

Our solution can be seen trivial at first sight, but let's examine it first; even better, let's try it on our instrument, its qualities will come out.

A commitment: simplify it

Well, the secret is all here. But in practice, which kind of simplification can we do? Is there the risk of over-simplifying, losing important colors from our palette? Well, calm down because we're getting there...

First of all it must be said that there are many intervention areas, all related to rhythmic guitar:

• chord simplification;
• thythm simplification;
• dynamics control.

In this article we'll see only the first item (chord composition): stay tuned because more lessons are coming!

Chords

This fundamental step is done...rolling of drums...taking away notes!!

"Was that simple? Where's the catch?" Yes, it is that simple; taking away notes from an arrangment often leads to something richer: there is more room for other instruments (more "air"), but the risk of getting pushed to a corner is less serious because the sonic spectrum is less crowded. Let's see some examples.

In the table below we can find the most frequent cases of simplification on major chords composed of three notes, the so-called triads. Notes within a circle are the roots of the chords.

Major triads

Complete chord	Alternative #1	Alternative #2
1.a	1.b	1.c
2.a	2.b	2.c In this case the root is not even played!
3.a	3.b	3.c

We leave to you as an exercise all the other cases:

• minor and diminished triads;
• major quadriads;
• minor and diminished quadriads;
• extensions: 9, 11, 13, and combinations.

You will notice quite early that many of these chords will be absolutely identical: minor 7 (quadriad) and major (triad), 7/#9 and 7°...have you ever heard of Chord Substitution?

The point is: now play them to appreciate their usefulness. Next time at reharsal try to simplify your strumming, everybody will notice how better the arrangements will sound, the overall sound will be more clear and, best of all...with less effort! Granted ;)

Further details

Many asked me which program did I use to make those fancy chords schemes, and the answer has been a bit surprising for most of them: no complex tablature or notation programs, just Inkscape.

Here is the SVG drawing I used as template, feel free to use it as you like:

template_accordo.svg