Watch the I'm Your Man online guitar lesson by Robben Ford from Rhythm Revolution

I started the song with that E minor. You don't want to play too much with the strings ringing and rolling around. It's a little easier to prevent that with an open string when you're playing a closed voicing. I not only lift my hand off the strings but I'm still touching them. This is very basic and consistent. It keeps your rhythm part moving along and out of the way of other things that might be giving more harmonic information. The next chord is F sharp minor but I'm letting the B string ring, and the high E ring. I am deadening the low strings with thumb and finger. I'm giving it a little bit of a double time feel and that's to push the song along. It elevates, it escalates, there is some tension building because that is what we're doing here. It's not just a static thing. Sometimes that's what you want is static. James Brown records were static, but so funky you didn't want to change a thing. You are going somewhere with it emotionally, you're bringing it up. The way to do that is to double up the time a little bit. We've added a little harmonic information and it's a little higher. There's always a theme running. Play consistently. It speaks to people. You are doing something on purpose. You're not just flying around the instrument trying to play a bunch of stuff.

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