5 Funk tips to improve your groove

Today I want to talk a little about funk playing! Funk is a huge genre, and it would be easy to think that as soon as you have your 16th note strumming you have it covered… This isn't the case. Absolutely the right hand groove is a massive part of the whole thing, but it's not everything. In this blog post I will take you through 5 really cool ideas that you can work on to improve your overall funk playing. Let's dive in!

The Video

Firstly let me just say thank you to everyone who showed up for this live YT video! Please note that it is a live recording, so make sure you use the chapter markers on YouTube to get to the core learning of the lesson! Unless of course you like listening to the introductions and chit chat with the students that were live on the chat… In which case, watch it all!

Tip 1 - Triads

If you've ever listened to Nile Rodgers then you've heard triads in action. A triad is a grouping of three notes to make a chord. For example, if you wanted to play a major triad, you can take the 1st, 3rd and 5th note from the chord & voila! Just like this:

On guitar, open chords or barre chords have these notes repeated, but that is still referred to as a triad. However, generally on guitar when we talk about triads, we are referring to smaller groupings of just the core three notes. Using these smaller voicings we can get a much less "muddy" sound when we're strumming the guitar in a funky fashion!

To continue that point, take for example a progression that simply moves from E to A major. Played as barre chords or open chords would sound chunky, but played like these shapes will have a completely different vibe:

Give that a try and see the difference it makes! This is the beauty of triads and why they are so much fun to work with.

Tip 2 - Practice with drums

Next up we're talking about your practice time! Using a drum loop or a metronome is absolutely essential for your funk chops, and I personally prefer the drum beat as it feels more solid than the metronome. Having said tat, Cory Wong (the new age funk GOAT) is a massive advocate for metronome usage, so if you already do that then great.

My main focus with the drum loop or metronome is to put on a reasonable BPM, around 80-90BPM and work on my 16th note strumming within that. Syncing up those 16th notes is absolutely crucial and makes a huge difference to the sound of the funk playing when you start to get good at that exercise!

If you don't have a drum machine for this practice, don't worry we've got you covered. As a member of guitrclub.io you get an incredible drum machine ready to go via our toolbox. It looks like this and you can access it easily on every page on the site when you are logged in:

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Tip 3 - The Squeeze

Now this is a cool idea, and relatively simple once you get the hang of it. If you take a simple triad or barre chord, as we looked at above, and play the chord with one strum you will naturally here the chord ring out until the sound naturally dies away. This is great for pop and folk and other forms of music, but for funky stuff we want to control the squeeze.

So, I want you to take this simple chord below, making sure that the E, A and high E string are muted by your other fingers (this may take a bit of time first anyway):

From here I want you to experiment releasing the pressure of the chord until the sound stops. You don't have to fully take your fingers off the guitar, just enough so that the sound completely finishes. With that feeling understood, try to release the pressure immediately after you hear the chord. Then try to release the pressure a few seconds after the chord, and keep experimenting with the length of time you hold the chord on and take it off. This is the squeezing technique!

Tip 4 - Bubble Picking

This picking style is at the heart of great funk, pop and soul playing! My favourite track to practice this technique growing up was Thriller by Michael Jackson, which has Steve Lukather playing an incredible little bubble picked line. Not sure what bubble picking means? Well, essentially it's doing 16th note strumming patterns, but with just single strings at a time and using melody notes rather than chords. Here is an example of a bubble picking part in tab:

Notice how we need to start thinking of these bubble patterns as rhythm patterns, rather than lead patterns. In this example, I would want to keep my right hand moving down up all the way through the pattern, and then the red arrows are the pentatonic notes, and "x" marks the ghost note (muted string). It can be hard to get this together without an audio file, but in Funk Essentials Level 1 you can find the entire of Unit 3 works through bubble picking.

Tip 5 - Embellishments

Finally, let's talk a little about embellishments. This is the idea of taking a few basic chord shapes and seeing what else you can add or remove from it to create new sounds. Let's take for example the minor 7th chord shape and start adding a few embellishments to that:

As you can see from the image, we're sticking with the core of the shape but adding a finger here and there to create new sounds. Checkout the video at 44 minutes to see this in action!

Conclusion

There we have it! As I've made clear during the blog post, we have plenty of full courses on the site that cover these subject areas, giving you a detailed analysis and exercises to use to put them into practice. So, when you're ready! Good love, and keep up the funk!