Groove is the essence of how your playing feels. It's important to learn the notes – the cool licks, the important chords, the turnarounds – but none of that matters if you're speeding up, slowing down, dropping beats or just plain forgetting what happens next.
The good news, though, is that far from being some vague abstraction ("you've either got it or ya don't"), groove is
something you can work on just like anything else.
And with a great groove, you can make even the simplest things sound really good.
A great groove comes down to playing what you know with a kind of relaxed urgency – the ability to play with confidence and conviction.
And that confidence and conviction comes from knowing you can count on your thumb and fingers to do what you want them to
do, when you want them to do it.
If you're struggling to play better, the first thing you might need is a better way to learn new songs. So in today's workshop, I'll show you my favorite way to get your thumb and fingers coordinated: "The Horizontal 3-Step."
Why "horizontal?"
When you learn fingerstyle guitar from tab, each measure looks like a series of vertical moves: first you grip this bass note with this melody
note, then you grab this chord, then you grip the next pair of bass and melody notes, and so on.
But really, those vertical grips are just the mechanics.
What you're really trying to do is express two horizontal ideas at once: a melody, which is unfolding over time, and a bass line, which is unfolding parallel to
that melody.
The better you understand each of those horizontal things – the melody and the bass line – the quicker you can memorize each of them, and the more reliably you can sync them up as the beats go by.