Modern singer-songwriters like John Mayer, Dave Mathews and Jason Mraz (and there are many others) elevated the art of guitar accompaniment to a whole new level. You hear fresh chord voicings, exciting rhythm patterns, bass lines, percussive elements, riffs and other melodic elements supporting their vocals — and they do it all with just six strings and a pick. That’s “acoustic groove” at its very best.
You don’t need to be a ‘fingerstyle’ player to take advantage of the guitar’s polyphonic wonders. Players who are more comfortable using a pick can also make their guitar accompaniments sound like a whole band is playing and that’s what Adam Miller’s Acoustic Groove is designed to do.
“Acoustic Groove is designed to show you how to translate the sound and feel of an entire band on to your 6 strings. There is a strong focus on bass lines and how to incorporate these into your chords. You'll learn about how chords work and scales to help you develop interesting bass lines to compliment the style. There are a huge variety of techniques for both you picking and fretting hand - and the majority of this is shown using a pick!”
In the first section, Adam demonstrates 14 key concepts and techniques to help you develop a modern polyphonic approach for guitar accompaniment: Simplified Chord Voicings Left-Hand Muting Chords, Thinking Like A Drummer, Muting With Single Notes, Right Hand Picking Technique, Left Hand Tips & Tricks, Fingerstyle Techniques, Simple Bass Lines, 1 to 5 Bass Lines, Scales To Use For Bass Lines, Walking Bass, Funky Bass, Straight 8 Bass Lines and Gear & Tone.
You’ll put all those new skills to work across the 5 Performance Studies that Adam steps you through in the second section: Empty Loungeroom, Groovin’ Texas Blues, Lord Mayor, The Sleazy Song and Shifting Straight Units.
All of the key demonstrations, performances and examples are tabbed and notated for your practice, reference and study purposes. You’ll also get Guitar Pro files so that you can loop and/or slow any section down as you work through the lessons.
Grab your acoustic guitar, favorite pick and get your groove on!
What you'll learn
Create cleaner, less muddy chord voicings
Use moveable chord shapes that work across multiple chord types
Master the concept of rhythmic interplay between guitar parts
Apply pick technique to multi-part playing
Develop ability to create full-sounding arrangements as a solo guitarist
Make your Acoustic Guitar Groove and get the whole room bopping their heads! This course is designed to show you how to translate the sound and feel of an entire band on to your 6 strings. There is a strong focus on bass lines and how to incorporate these into your chords. You'll learn about how chords work and scales to help you develop interesting bass lines to compliment the style. There are a huge variety of techniques for both your picking and fretting hand - and the majority of this is shown using a pick! There is also some advanced fingerstyle techniques too.
2SECTION 1: Essential Concepts
The concepts of this course give you the fundamental elements of playing groove on acoustic guitar. Each concept is broken down initially into simple ideas and then expanded upon to help further challenge your technique and feel. This allows you to start straight away, but gives you much more to work on as you progress.
3Simplified Chord Voicings
As guitar players we often learn chords that are way more complicated than they need to be. Here we learn how chords can be broken down to just the 1st &-3rd, plus the 1st, 3rd, & 7th. This help to hear the tonality of the chord much more easily. Plus it also frees up fretting hand fingers to do more in the bass line department.
4Left-Hand Muting Chords
String muting with your fretting hand is one of the most overlooked areas of both rhythm, lead, and solo guitar playing. Learn how with practice and patience you can stop all the strings you don't want to hear so you can focus on the strings you DO want to hear! This allows you to let your picking hand concentrate on the groove.
5Thinking Like A Drummer
Thinking like a drummer seems like a radical, if not comical concept! By having an awareness of how simple drum patterns work, we can divide the bass and chords of the guitar up to create a better impression of the groove of a song.
6Muting With Single Notes
Learn to play through scales while striking every string with your picking hand and muting the other strings with you fretting hand. This is essential for being able to play bass lines with your chords, and also the fundamental of so many great players' styles including Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, John Mayer and so on.
7Right Hand Picking Technique
The ability to play bass lines with your chords requires a variety of control in your picking hand. This concept covers the various techniques used when playing with a pick in order to subdivide the guitar. I explain tonal ideas that allow you to create the sounds of double bass and percussion instruments.
Acoustic Groove course unlocked a whole new groove world for me
I've heard players really getting that amazing bass + chord groove on guitar, but was just stumbling around trying to figure out what they were doing. Adam Miller really breaks it down. He shows basic techniques I've been able to incorporate right away and he also introduces and demos techniques I will be working on for months and months and months (So I guess that's really years). Great balance of introducing theory when you really need it to apply the lesson. Highly recommend.
M
Mollerberg
Verified buyer
05/04/23
That was just what I'm looking for.
F
Francesco S.
09/15/22
A go-to course to push your ‘groovy’ rhythmic playing a step further
“Acoustic Groove” by Adam Miller is a great course on modern ‘groovy’ acoustic rhythm guitar for intermediate-to-advanced players.
It covers exhaustively all the basics of this approach to guitar playing, from ‘thinking like a drummer’ in order to diversify and give that beat to your strumming, to muting single notes (Concept 4 is an excellent exercise for soloing as well). Other engaging lessons include percussive fingerstyle techniques (Concept 7), ideas for bass lines (Concepts 12 and 13), and, finally, gear and accessories to obtain a thick and mellow sound.
In the second section, Adam goes through some (very challenging) compositions to apply the above concepts—including songs in the style of the likes of ‘electrified’ artists such as Stevie Ray Vaughan (Groovin’ Texas Blues) and Steely Dan (Lord Mayor of New Lambton), as well as funky tunes.
W
Wolfgang4D
Verified buyer
05/02/22
Fun grooves
This is not an easy course for me as I am still lacking the skills to be able to play the grooves taught in the videos. This is definitely not a beginner course.
That said, the examples and techniques demonstrated in the lessons are beautiful and they will take your intermediate/advanced skills to a new level of playing the acoustic guitar. I enjoyed just watching the lessons. Although I don't have much use for the course right now as beginner, I don't regret buying it as I'm sure it'll be very useful once I've mastered the the more basic skills of playing guitar.
R
Revman2015
01/31/21
Seiously Good
Adam Millers Acoustic groove guitar course is a must do course. In fact it could be the course for nailing pulse in your Acoustic grooves.You’ll learn a lot from this course.His Variances caught me by surprise. Some seriously complex stuff if your up to the challenge. He is seriously good.
