Stop 4 of 5
Sixteenths and funk
Sixteenth-note strumming, muted strums and the hand that never stops.
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Stop 4 of 5
Sixteenth-note strumming, muted strums and the hand that never stops.
Time to move to another corner of the garden: we leave the calm flowers of fingerstyle and step into the part where everything moves. Funk turns the guitar into percussion with pitches: dry hits, muted strums, tiny chords and a strumming hand that never stops. The secret here isn't in the chords, it's in the time: every in its place.
Listen to this pattern over an E9 chord. Notice the dry hits with no pitch: they're half the groove. And notice what you can't hear: the guitarist's hand is moving all the time, even in the gaps.
Four slots per beat, sixteen per bar. Arrows are strokes with pitch, crosses are muted strokes and dots are the hand passing through the air. It looks like a lot of information at first; in this stop we sort it out piece by piece. By the end you'll be able to read a grid like this one at a glance and turn it into motion without thinking about each arrow.
Rule number one of funk strumming is : the hand moves down and up without stopping, in sixteenths, whether or not it touches the strings. It's like a pendulum: you decide the rhythm by choosing when to hit, but the pendulum never stops.
Start without chords. Mute the strings by resting your fretting hand lightly on them and strum every sixteenth. Listen to the grid:
If sixteen strokes per bar feel like a lot, build a bridge: first in eighths (down on the beat, up on the "&"), then in sixteenths at the same tempo. The motion is the same; it just gets half the size and twice as fast. Loose wrist, relaxed forearm: the movement comes from the wrist, not the shoulder.
To read funk rhythms you need a name for each sixteenth. Each beat is counted "one-e-and-a": the number falls on the beat, the "&" halfway (the eighth note), and the "e" and "a" on the quarters in between.
These are the sixteenth-note figures you'll see most. Each one fills one beat:
| Figure | Where it sounds | Count |
|---|---|---|
| four sixteenths | all of them | 1 e & a |
| eighth + two sixteenths | 1, &, a | 1 · & a |
| two sixteenths + eighth | 1, e, & | 1 e & · |
| sixteenth + eighth + sixteenth | 1, e, a | 1 e · a |
| dotted eighth + sixteenth | 1, a | 1 · · a |
Listen to them one by one, each figure repeated for a bar:
If you split a beat into four sixteenths and the hand makes one complete movement (down and up) every half beat, the downstrokes coincide with positions 1 and 3 of each group (the beat and the "&") and the upstrokes with 2 and 4 (the "e" and the "a"). That fixed match is what makes constant motion work: if you know which sixteenth you're on, you know which way your hand is going, and vice versa. That's why a written funk rhythm can be turned into arrows without thinking: odd sixteenth (counting from 1) = down, even sixteenth = up.
In funk, the strings don't always ring. There are three kinds of slot:
This pattern puts the chucks on beats 2 and 4, exactly where the drummer usually plays the snare:
A pattern where every stroke sounds the same is flat, like a drawing with no shading. give it relief: some sixteenths louder, others barely brushed. In funk, the most important notes are often the ones that don't fall on the beat.
In these two examples the hand plays all sixteen sixteenths, but only some downstrokes are strong. In the first, the accent falls on each beat; in the second, on each "&". Hear how the feel changes even though the strokes are the same:
The second example already has the funk sway: accents on the "&" pull the rhythm forward. Here's how it looks in notation, with the accents marked above the notes:
Funk guitarists rarely strum six strings. They prefer fragments of two or three notes on the top strings: they leave room for the bass and keyboards, and they sound short and sharp. The star chord is the dominant ninth.
E9 is a (E, G♯, B, D) with the ninth added (F♯). The three-string fragment (G♯, D, F♯) leaves out the root and the fifth: third, seventh and ninth. Why does it work without a root? Because the bass player is already playing it, and because the third and seventh are the notes that define the chord's character. You'll come back to these ideas in more depth in the advanced harmony stages.
In funk it's common to stay on a single chord for a long time (a vamp): all the interest is in the rhythm. Here's an original one on the E9 fragment. In the second bar you come in from a half step below, sliding the shape up one fret, a classic trick of the genre.
Goal: Strum muted sixteenths for two minutes without speeding up or slowing down, at 70 BPM.
Play this pattern, alternating pressure and release in the fretting hand. Make sure the chucks have no pitch at all.
Goal: Play the pattern with chucks on 2 and 4 over Em7 with completely dry muted strokes, at 80 BPM.
Goal: Play the E9 vamp four times in a row without any unwanted string ringing, at 80 BPM.
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