4 Awesome Courses to Help You Learn Rhythm Guitar

We're looking for rhythm guitar lessons that will help you keep time, improve your ability to stick to a beat, and help you get better at handling basic chord progressions.

To curate this material, we'll refer to content from online guitar resources we trust, focusing on specific courses within those programs.

To help us narrow down our choices, we've chosen some criteria that are uniquely important to rhythm guitar lessons, and will help us grade each one in this category.

They include the following:

• Understanding rhythm guitar as a whole
• Focus on chord shapes and progressions
• Explanation of timing, beat, strumming, and tempo
• Demonstration and application of concepts

In addition to the highlight box above, we've included a table of all the lessons we'll recommend in this article. Please keep in mind that these are affiliate links that we use to support Guitar Chalk and to make genuine recommendations at no extra cost to you. 

Best Rhythm Guitar Lessons (our top picks)

In this section we've listed all of our rhythm guitar lesson recommendations in a table. While we partner with these programs to support Guitar Chalk, we've also tested and vetted them ourselves with full memberships.

In other words, we don't recommend them just because they're partners - they're partners because we've been recommending and using them ourselves for a long time.

Signing up through our links is a great way to support our work at no extra cost to you. Thank you.

Guitar Tricks Fundamentals I and Acoustic I

This is a recommendation of two courses from Guitar Tricks, the first of which is a more basic, beginner-level course, while the second is a more detailed and intermediate-level course designed specifically for acoustic guitar.

• Guitar Fundamentals I taught by Lisa McCormick: Beginner Level
• Acoustic Level I taught by Anders Mouridsen: Intermediate Acoustic-Focused

Together, both courses give you a strong foundation of rhythm topics, where you could skip the Fundamentals course if you've already gotten familiar with beginner concepts. Between the two courses you get a plenty of chord structure explanation, help navigating progressions, and plenty of instruction on keeping time along with help applying and practicing each concept.

We'd recommend both for beginners looking to get a handle on the cornerstone aspects of rhythm guitar.

Read the full reviews: Full Guitar Tricks or just the Fundamentals I Course or watch the video reviews of each course below.

IDEAL FOR: A comprehensive look at rhythm guitar basics

JamPlay's Basics with Mark Lincoln

Mark Lincoln's Basics course in JamPlay is over 900 minutes of content and is almost exclusively devoted to rhythm guitar topics. He covers everything from basic chords, to transitions, liquid chords, strumming technique, and some more advanced rhythm concepts.

Nuanced strumming technique, extended chord voicings, and other complex rhythm topics are addressed later in the course, though it builds on the material he covers in earlier videos.

It's definitely better for more advanced players that want to get a refresher on rhythm, and refine their skills with some deeper content.

We'd recommend this course to anyone that wants to improve their ability to keep time or go deeper on their chord and rhythm knowledge.

Read the full review: JamPlay or watch the video review below.

IDEAL FOR: Going from beginner to advanced rhythm concepts in a quicker period of time

TrueFire's 50 Blues Rhythms and Rhythm Mojo

These two courses from TrueFire are both heavy on rhythm guitar, but they have an angle that's distinctly slanted towards performance, especially in a blues context.

Corey Congilio's course is all about expanding your vocabulary of rhythm riffs and takes you through 50 examples that are a mixture of shuffles, jazz rhythms, and straight beats. 

• 50 Blues Rhythms Course
• Rhythm Mojo Course

The Rhythm Mojo course by Shane Theriot is a little more technical and gets you into some more nuanced theory concepts like chord construction, triad rhythms, and melding your rhythm with melody lines.

For learning rhythm on a more advanced level, they're two great courses to target and both are available for a one-time fee and digital download.

Read the full review: TrueFire

IDEAL FOR: Advanced rhythm study, blues, and live performance

How We Pick Lessons

Whether we're recommending guitar lessons for rhythm or something else, we always do two levels of research. First, we know all of the most popular online guitar lessons programs and have rated them from a high-level view.

Second, we've picked out individual courses within those programs that are best-suited for particular needs. 

• Use programs we already know and trust
• Pick out particular courses with those programs to highlight for particular tasks

In this case, that need is studying rhythm guitar.

Thus, we're not only recommending the best overall programs, but we're recommending courses within those programs.

Also, we're guitar players and musicians that are familiar with the industry and the instrument. We don't make any recommendations without doing our homework and knowing exactly what we're talking about, both from a musical and educational perspective.

You can read more about our affiliates and partners here.

Criteria

To rate guitar lessons we have a high-level system that includes four categories:

• Value
• Content quality
• Education quality 
• Topical organization

With all types of lessons we always use all four of those categories. For rhythm guitar lessons, we're also considering the criteria we mentioned earlier:

• Broad overview of rhythm guitar
• Covers chord shapes (structures) and progressions
• Covers timing, beat, strumming, and tempo
• Shows you how to apply rhythm concepts 

Cost and Value of Parent Programs

Value is hard to measure when you're talking about a single course within a paid membership program, because those courses usually aren't priced individually.

However, we like to provide a value chart for each parent program (the more popular ones) that show you how they perform based on their overall rating and monthly price.

In this graph, lower and further to the right is better, where you can see that Guitar Tricks, TrueFire, and JamPlay all perform quite well.

Rhythm Guitar Overview

Does the course provide a broad overview of rhythm and touch on a wide range of sub-topics? We selected courses that didn't just have a few videos on rhythm, but were characterized by a deep and comprehensive study of rhythm guitar throughout.

• Broad overview of rhythm guitar
• Covers a wide range of sub-topics
• Comprehensive coverage of rhythm guitar

Chord Structures and Progressions

Rhythm guitar study hinges largely on a student's understanding of chord structures and progressions. We looked for courses that explained these concepts and provided a foundational understanding of how chords are put together and how those chords are then used to build progressions over bass lines.

In varying forms and methods, all of the courses recommended in this article cover these two concepts.

Timing, Beat, Strumming, and Tempo

To be a truly good rhythm guitar player, you have to understand how your guitar interacts with a bass line and the actual rhythm of the song, or some might say, the drum set. The best rhythm guitar lessons explain this process by covering how to keep time, how to understand beat, and how those processes relate to strumming.

Applying Rhythm Concepts

Once you understand chords and some strumming mechanics, the best way to refine your skills is to practice them in some kind of musical context. A good course will show you how to do that and help you apply what you've learned by playing along with a song, backing track, or some other kind of example.

Conclusion

Rhythm is both hard to learn and to teach.

However, we believe the five courses in this list are some of the best and most effectively-presented rhythm guitar lessons available.

They meet all of the standards we've set, both for guitar lessons in general and for lessons that are specific to rhythm. We're confidently recommending them for all skill levels.

Your Questions and Comments

Do you have questions about the lessons and courses we've recommended here?

If so, feel free to leave them in the comments section.

Your own experience, perhaps if you've taken one of these courses, is welcome there as well. I'll see you there.

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