Campfire guitar

Table of contents

Comprehension

Chords and their changes

Three important symbols

Picking or strumming

The C chord

The bass strings

Down & Up

Tom Dooley

Different rhythm patterns

Knockin` on heaven’s door

Bass accompaniment

Now we add the beat

We continue to expand

One-mil-lion-Dol-lar-jack-pot - the master strum with bass

1 + 6

THTTTHT

Songlist for the THTTTHT

Jeeeez

List of songs for the Jeeeez

Whiskey in the jar

Extravagant

Waltz

Waltz, part 2

Wild Rover, a waltz at its best

Rock`n Roll with C&O

C&O

Different versions of the same pattern

Streets of Philadelphia

Rocking all over the world

Hammering

The night they drove old Dixie down - Intro with Hammering

Sweet Home Alabama

If I had a hammer

Every breath you take

Christmas carols

Picking pattern no. 1

The bass picking for the picking pattern no. 1

Sailing

Tears in heaven

Tears in heaven, part 2

Picking pattern no. 3

Different patterns and their bass pickings

Bass pickings part 2

Bass pickings part 3

Emphasizing individual strings

Rock - folk - country

Bass runs

Bass run, part 2

Bass run with C F G

How about one more

That’s it for now

Imprint

Hello, my name is Christian Pahlke

Every beginner as a guitar player sooner or later wonders. I can play chords, but what next? Here is the answer. What you are looking for and need now is the rhythm (strumming and picking patterns).

A song consists of three components: a melody, the chords, and the rhythm. You know the melody of your favorite songs, you can find the matching chords on the Internet, so all you’re really missing is the rhythm.

With this book I’d like to show you those rhythms with which I accompany a lot of songs from many musical styles. Here, you won’t read anything about notes, musical scales, 3/4 or 1/16 time, triplets, fifths, thirds, amplitude or similar things. I'm not going to make this a musicology lesson. I will show you the rhythms that I gathered in a way that you can play them straight away and thereby can accompany endless amounts of well-known songs. At the beginning, the rhythms are partially converted into a counting method so that really every not-so-absolute-beginner can improve. Easy figures allow you to see at a glance what is important. All the interesting things are immediately visible.

If you can change chords without a problem then this is the right book for you. But if you still have to learn how to play chords then unfortunately this is the wrong book for you. You can find a lot of books in music stores that deal with learning chords. There, you can also find a lot of music books with texts and the matching chords. Here, you can easily apply these rhythms. I wrote this book so that you can continue right after having learned chords.There are easy rhythms like “Every breath you take" and there are complicated ones like Creedence Clearwater’s "Proud Mary". There are gentle rhythms like Peter Sarstedt’s "Where do you go to, my lovely?" and there are quite hectic but nevertheless really simples ones like Trini Lopez`s "If I had a hammer". There are rhythms for "La Bamba", "Country roads", "This is the life", "Bed of roses", "Oh Donna", "Silvia’s mother", "At the hop", "Keep on rocking me", "Young girl", "Summer Wine", "Indian reservation", "Sailing", "Black is black", "Summer of 69", "Sweet home Alabama", "Wish you were here", "Angie", "In the year 2525", "Let it be", "Love hurts", "I am, I said", "Easy living", "The air that I breath", "I was made for lovin’ you", "Let`s twist again", "Hotel California" and so on and on...

Comprehension

You should try to learn to understand rhythms. They all have their own melodies. It would be very helpful for you to develop a sense for it. The more this develops, the more confidently you can later correlate a song with a rhythm. This is exactly what I want to show you with this book in the first place. You should practically be able to figure out which rhythm, strumming, or picking pattern matches best to the song. There aren’t too many different options you see. It’s just that usually you don’t know how to proceed. But if you read through this book and the articles that interest you and learn the material then actually you shouldn’t have a big problem with it anymore. Rhythm is a matter of pure feeling. You can’t just rush through a rhythm and the necessary pattern without feeling it. It’s the same with dancing. Rhythms are nothing less than harmoniously balanced, concatenated sequences. So a matter of pure feeling. I will show you some nice rhythms and you will soon understand what you have to do: simply play, nothing more. And I will give you many hints which songs you can accompany them with. You can practice with these. Unfortunately, I can’t give you too many useful texts with chords and my rhythms all together. Almost all, with a few exceptions, underlie the copyright law. But this shouldn’t keep you from learning the rhythms anyway. There are plenty of texts with chords on the Internet, and many books available as well. If you accompany them with my rhythms then you have teaching material without end.

First, start to play and practice for a while, and once you’ve found the one or the other rhythm that works well for you then you should start to sing along. Changing chords fluently and learning the rhythms will probably be enough in the beginning. Please don’t be surprised if I sometimes write about rhythms and other times about patterns. This refers to the same thing. By the way, often several different patterns fit to the same song, but not always.

Chords and their changes

Often people ask me when to change chords. Well, on the one hand the chords are usually written above the corresponding text passage which you can find on the Internet or in books. At that point where the new chord is written, that’s where the old chord has to be replaced, it’s that simple. But sometimes neither the text passage nor the chord is correct, unfortunately. Then you should look for different versions of the song. That sometimes happens to the author because of different formats and programs that he or she is working with. But on the other hand at some point you must develop a feeling for the best timing when to change chords. That just happens to be a real matter of feeling, just like a rhythm.

That is why you should always start with really easy songs if you still have problems with it, like for instance “Lady in black“, “The drunken sailor“, “Hymn“ and “Tom Dooley“, each with 2 chords. A really great song to practice changing chords is an old and popular tune. It has many chord changes, that’ s how you learn it best. Each chord is strummed one or more times and you can hear inevitably that you have to change the chord. Practice it with single strums. For each chord symbol you strum down on the guitar with the thumb on your right hand.