Funk/Soul Guitar Workshop
by Manuel Breu

Hallo, my name is MANU and I’ve written an workshop concerning the topic funk/soul guitar...Hope you have fun...

Right Hand

One mistake, made by many funk-starter is, that they try to set accents with their right hand. The right hand should almost always stroke permanently up and down.

Try this before you start!

Exercise 1:

Put your metronome to let's say 90 bpm, mute the strings with your left hand and play 16^th (count: 1 e+e  2 e+e   3 e+e  4 e+e). Try to do this first of all with all strings; if you can do this well, only “scratch” the high e- and b-string, but try to stroke over (!!!) the other strings (don’t touch them!) Then, if you can do this well, only play the high e-string;

These muted notes you are playing now are called Ghost Notes; These are a very important part at playing funk-guitar.

The movement should be made 45° corner to the strings, not in 90°, like you would do it, playing western guitar. It should look like this:

Wrong:

Right:

The movement should come out of your wrist. It should feel a bit like turning a key.

The next step is setting accents: A good exercise for practicing this are these ones…don’t forget that you should permanently stroke up and down.

Exercise 2a:

Exercise 2b:

Exercise 2c:

Exercise 2d:

Now you are able to play real 16th grooves...

Page 2, 16th note grooves

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