![]() You can help yourself here by tapping out the beats with your foot, slow and steady. If you’ve listened to the first third of Guitar Noise Podcast 3, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. ![]() The most important part of this is to make the triplet a triplet, spreading the three notes evenly across the beat, and not turning it into a set of three sixteenth notes with a sixteenth note rest attached. Most people count sixteenth notes like this: “One, ee, and, ah, two, ee, and, ah…” and triplets are counted “one and ah two and ah…” So we’re going to combine these two and make this measure of two beats go “One, ee, and, ah, two and ah.” The purpose for doing this is to make it easier to count and to get the rhythm into your head. A triplet over two beats will become a triplet over a single beat. To do this, we’re cutting all the note values in half – half notes become quarter notes, quarter notes become eighth notes and eighth notes become sixteenth notes. So we’re going to “cheat” for a moment and make it simpler to count by pretending the song was written in 2/4 time, like this: That may sound simple enough (although I’m certain to many of you it doesn’t sound simple in the least), but how do we go about making this happen? Counting out a triplet over two beats isn’t at all easy, even for seasoned players. This indicates that these three notes make up a quarter note triplet, which means that these three notes are supposed to be evenly spread out among these last two beats of the measure. Looking closer, though, you should see a little bracket over these three quarter notes and a number “3” imbedded in that bracket. The last three notes, at first glance, are quarter notes, which would be problematic in that we would be looking at a total of five beats in the first measure, a measure that is clearly marked in “4/4” time so it should have only four beats in it. I thought it would be good to have them all within easy fingering of one another. ![]() And this would probably be a great place to point out that while I’ve written out to play these notes at the second fret of the D string, you can also play them elsewhere on the neck of your guitar, such as the seventh fret of the A string or the twelfth fret of the low E (sixth) string, if you prefer. The first is a dotted quarter note and lasts for a beat and a half in length, while the second is an eighth note and is a half beat in length. The first two notes, the E notes located at the second fret of the D string, are harmless enough. Here is the bass guitar part, a line of single notes, which I’ve written out for guitar: It’s this first part that contains the interesting rhythm we want to look at and analyze. There is also a second two-measure pattern that “formally” ends each verse and also pops up during the solo and at the end of the interlude between the first and second verse. This part also serves as the introduction, the outro and as a musical interlude between the verses. These verses are essentially made up of two parts, one that repeats itself over and over even though it may be played by just the bass guitar at some points and by a dense, multi-layered recording of guitars the next. ![]() There are three verses, four if you count the guitar solo between the second and third verse as verse. Structurally, Seven Nation Army is about as simple as song come. We’re also going to take the song apart as we normally do in these lessons, but for the purpose of latter creating a single acoustic guitar arrangement of this song. The purpose of this lesson, a look at Seven Nation Army, from the White Stripes 2003 major label debut album, Elephant, is twofold – first we want to look at the interesting rhythmic pattern that serves as the song’s signature hook. How does one go about learning if one can’t get instruction? It should be easy to understand that, for a beginner (not to mention for a teacher), “I just do it” is more than mildly frustrating. And someofne who has just picked up the guitar will ask how you did that and you don’t really have an answer for them other than “I just do it.” Someone plays a chord or strums a rhythm and we just follow along. Sometimes we just hear things and play them.
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