A Great Little Trick I Learned From Joe Walsh

Añadido: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Heat. [music] [music] [music] Heat.

[00:00:25]>> [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat.

[00:00:42][music] Heat. Heat.

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[00:01:27]>> Hello chaps. I just want to butt in here for a second to let you know that if you're enjoying these videos, you can get them weeks if not months in advance by signing up for the tier 2 level of my Patreon membership. Tier one at $3 a month gets you access to the tabs and jam tracks and so on that accompany the YouTube videos when they go out on YouTube. But if you can't wait and you want early access, tier two is what you need. $6 a month you get early access to the videos and any associated tabs and so on. Plus, you also get a twice monthly at the moment, although I'm looking to make it a little bit more frequent Zoom hangout with me and the other tier 2 chaps. If you're not interested in an ongoing financial regular commitment each month, then fear not. You can also purchase individual uh pieces of content, a tab or a jam track or anything like that for $3 a pop. No ongoing commitment, no nothing. You can just buy it and it's yours to keep. And I think that's covered everything. So, that's the shilling done with. Now, back to the show. Hello chaps. Welcome once again to John Robson Guitar Tuition. As always, I do hope you're well. That little tune there was um was just something I cooked up to make a bit of a point about um how to use rhythms. I've had a few requests for um more videos on uh timing issues and stuff like that, so I thought I'd oblige. And um you may have possibly spotted that the main riff on that tune, the way it kicked off, owed a little bit of a um a homage to a certain uh song by the Eagles, but don't tell Don Henley.

[00:03:00]He might get the copyright wombles onto me. Anyway, uh what we're talking about today are two rhythmic concepts uh that are sort of close, but uh not exactly the same. They're related, shall we say?

[00:03:12]Uh displacement and syncupation. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned both of them before, but just to nail things down, here is um me describing what's going on.

[00:03:22]>> Here is the explanation.

[00:03:24]>> Right. What we're dealing with here is uh the business of where you place the accented or emphasized notes or chords in relation to the beat. Um the both riffs that were involved in that little tune that we heard earlier are based around the 16th note rhythm. What are 16th notes? Well, 16th notes are what you get if you take the beats in the bar, usually four of them, and divide each one of those beats into uh four kind of subsections if you like. And that is the way this is counted. You can see one eander, two eander, three eander, four yander. And I've done four bars worth of that count there. Uh because each of the riffs is essentially four bars in length. And the little asterisks across the top, they show where your metronome beats uh need to land. So, basically what you do is you set your metronome going. Let's do that now. I'll just fire up the uh metronome on my phone. And um we'll set it to something nice and comfortable like about 60 beats per minute, which is slower than the uh the actual track, but we get a metronome that goes like this.

[00:04:40]Okay. So what you do is you then count one e and 2 e and 3 e and 4 e and 1 e and 2 e and 3 e and 4 e and so on. And each one of those um kind of locations if you like each part of that count can be a place where you play a note basically. And um if we take a look at the first beats worth of the first riff in that tune, it's like this. Um, you can see we're playing on the uh 1 E and so one E [music] and if I do that with a metronome 3 4 1, [music] we get that. Okay. One E ander. [snorts] Uh, next up on beat two, we go um on the two and the and so [music] two two e and so so far we've got one e and [singing] two e and then what do we do next? We do [music] on basically the three and the and three and uh and then we go to four uh >> [music] >> 1 e [singing] and 2 e and [music] 3 e and 4 e and there we go. Now there's nothing particularly syncopated about that but um that's going to come later.

[00:06:10]What we're going to look at next is what happens in the next bar which is this.

[00:06:15]We basically do the same thing again but we just don't play anything on beat four. 1 e [music] and 2 e and 3 and then in the next bar we do uh where's the button? There it is. Uh 1 e and [music] 2 e and 3 e and four. So that kind of looks pretty much like the uh first bar. But this is where things get fun because what we're going to do now is we're going to start the that part of it again. um but not on beat one. We're going to start it, if you look closely, on the and ah of beat four in the penultimate bar. So, if I just kind of count through that um from the halfway point, we're getting 1 e and a 2 e and a three and a one e and a 2 e and a three e and a 4 e and [music] 1 e and so basically let's move on to the next slide. What? We've got part one, which starts on the beat. Part two starts on the beat. Part three starts on the beat.

[00:07:26]And part four starts there. It starts on the second half of the final beat in um the penultimate bar, meaning that part four begins half a beat early. It has been displaced. And rhythmic displacement like this is a massive part of what can make um a riff or a lick or a chord sequence, anything like that, sound just that little bit more interesting. You've probably already gathered which um Eagle's riff I'm um I'm kind of slightly borrowing from in that riff there. And it's that, you know, I'm not going to play the riff cuz I don't want kind of um what's his name?

[00:08:11]Don Henley helping himself to the contents of my wallet. But you know [music] [music] there we go. So I'll play that to a metronome just nice and slow.

[00:08:35][music] >> [snorts] [music] [music] >> You notice that last iteration of the riff. Let me just shut this up. Um, you know, began just that little bit ahead.

[00:08:56]And again, it just stops it from sounding, you know, overly repetitive and makes it sound more interesting. Now the um where do I want to be next? Which slide do I need? Is it that one? Yes. Um this is the one I think I need. This is um the second uh riff that would that you heard on there. The one that's going [music] that one in sort of the B section of the tune. And um that there you can see if we just kind of uh show where each of the um notes and chords are landing within that um within that particular riff. Uh and then if we just go to this one here, you can see the majority of the accented notes and chords in this riff are landing off the beat. Um that's being, you know, syncupation basically.

[00:09:52]That is what syncupation is. is when you um put a a a heavy emphasis on a part of the rhythm that isn't directly on the beat. Um that's what syncupation is and that's what's going on in uh this part of the um the tune, the riff, the solo, whatever. Um so that's syncupation and displacement is when you just take something that you you've established it in the listener's mind that um you know there is a particular order and a particular kind of um you know rhythmic um shape to something and then you just tilt it a little bit by starting it either early as I did in this case and Joe Walsh did on that famous Eagles riff or you start it a little bit late or you know and syncupation is when you um take something which is um you know a heav heavily accented thing that just wants to land on the beat but you don't land on the beat you land kind of on on the offbeat on the and or on the e or on the and ah um you know massively massively effective way of making mundane simple licks sound um you know interesting get used to using a metronome so you know get used to the rhythmic fundamentals.

[00:11:11]If I just play say um any old note here, I'm just going to use this A note at the seventh fret on the D string and just practice these little rhythmic fundamentals. So, you're getting kind of [music] there's 16th notes. Now, how about if I just miss the first 16th note on each beat?

[00:11:34][music] [singing] Or how about if I miss the first two on each beat like that? So you you just get used to these little rhythmic ideas and and placing them in various different places in in relation to the beat. 16th notes, eighth notes, whatever. Um here's a let's go up a little bit in tempo and we'll take this to Here we go. This will do. 76 beats per minute. And if I just now play um a group of notes on the beat, [music] then how about I just invert that and play those notes off the beat.

[00:12:24][music] And then maybe alternate it. 3 4 [music] [music] like that. and just getting fluent with that, you will find that it makes um you know it easier to come up with interesting licks, interesting solos, and you'll lose that sort of interesting riffs as well. And you'll lose that um thing that many guitarists feel that they have where everything sounds a bit kind of plotting and like it's just a bit boring. Basically, if that's something that um is is bugging you, then the answer isn't kind of learning more flashy licks. The answer isn't learning, you know, um, you know, some new exotic scale or something like that or learning to play faster, which, you know, this is this rhythmic kind of thing of working with a metronome, by the way, is a great way of developing speed. Uh, the answer is to get command of the rhythm uh, of the rhythms that you're playing, the rhythmic aspect of what you're doing, and, you know, just learn to harness that power. And, uh, well, there you go. Now you know what to do. go away and have some fun with it.

[00:13:36]And I really can't emphasize enough the importance of becoming uh rhythmically literate, shall we say, where you have as much of an understanding of where you are in the rhythm as you have of which fret you're at on the fretboard. Um, I wrote a blog post some time ago about something that I call the musical triangle, which has three sides that are all self-supporting. You've got melody, you've got harmony, as in the chords, and you've got the rhythm. And us guitarists, which is a bizarre thing, we start off playing rhythm guitar, strumming, keeping a rhythm going, but we tend not to focus on that aspect of things. And, you know, and we just tend to, you know, oh, I'll just kind of feel it. I'll just do it by I'll just kind of do it by instinct, which works. It's the way I learned. But then I had um a good bit of advice which was to you know understand what you do what that instinctive thing is that you're doing and you can get more mileage out of it as a result and I can uh hardly attest to that. So there's the little bit of advice today. Get rhythmically literate.

[00:14:44]Buy a metronome if you don't have one.

[00:14:46]Just download a free app for your phone and learn to use it. Yes, it's going to be a slog. Yes, it's going to feel like you're going back to square one and um you know, you're in kind of guitar kindergarten again, but you will progress and you it will be worth it.

[00:15:02]And after a year or so of working like this, you'll realize that you've made a lot more progress than you would have otherwise done without this um this awareness of rhythm. So, there you go.

[00:15:14]That's the lecture over. Hope you've enjoyed the video and if that's the case, please hit the subscribe button and the notification bell. if you haven't already done so. And why not drop me a like as well while you're at it. And of course, don't forget the live stream. Every Friday, 5:00 PM UK time, we drink beer and we chat. It is a fantastic way to kick off the weekend.

[00:15:33]And I'd love to see you there if you can make it. But for now, I'll bid you all a good day and say thank you so much for watching. Thank you for your time. Look after yourselves, folks. Stay well, stay safe, and above all, stay sane. Bye for now. [music]