Melodic Rhythm (on Guitar)
A melodic rhythm is a term used to describe a rhythm that is achieved not through individual notes and rests, but through a rhythmic melody.
If you are not yet familiar with what notes are or how the example below is read, you should first refer to the “Note and Rest Values” guide.
As an example, let’s consider a typical rhythm:
In this example, a rhythm is created using notes and rests, meaning we play notes and do not play during the rests.
In the case of a melodic rhythm, we aim to achieve the same effect without a single pause. For this, let’s consider a simpler example with fewer notes:
Now, we attempt to fill the rests with different notes. It’s essential to ensure that we don’t select notes that are too close together for the rests we want to fill.
If the notes are too close to each other (pitch wise), we won’t hear a rhythm but rather a sequence of notes. So always be mindful of, for instance, skipping a string to make the rhythm clearer.
It is, however, possible to generate a melodic rhythm even with a second (interval), but for this example, I prefer to use something that’s easier to hear.
So, I will now try to replace the rests with notes that are not necessarily too close to each other:
As you can see in the following example, all the notes that were not rests are noticeably higher in pitch than the notes before or after them. Our ears quickly adapt to the “low” notes. As soon as a new note is higher in pitch than the previous ones (or the ones that follow), we perceive it as a rhythm.
For the guitarists among us, here are the tabs to play along:
For comparison, I will once again replace all the rests with notes, but this time with lower-pitched notes. You probably notice that the melodic rhythm is now not as prominent and not as easily discernible.
Upon careful listening, you can still easily discern a “rhythm,” although it is not the rhythm we initially aimed for. Once again, we perceive the high notes as the melodic rhythm.
Rhythms with Palm Mutes
Another way in which guitarists can create a rhythm is through palm muting.
In this example, we are always playing the same chord (which, by the way, is an E5 power chord).
If we play everything “normally,” without palm mutes, it would sound like this:
So, we have simply played 4x4 (which is 16 beats per chord) chords, without any accents or rhythms.
But when we play the palm mutes (marked as P.M.), it sounds something like this:
The difference here is that we place an “accent” on the first note, the 4th note, the 7th note, and so on by omitting the palm mute.
You can think of it as achieving a similar result to the previous examples, the melodic rhythms. The only difference is that we’re not playing “low notes” to make the higher ones more audible, but we’re “muting” certain notes to make others stand out.
For the last example, I have a combination of palm mutes and melodic rhythms. In this case, we only play the low E string and emphasize it with much higher notes:
Additionally, we mute all the notes on the E string with palm mutes. This way, we’ve reinforced the riff both through palm mutes and melodic rhythms.
So, we have not a single rest, yet it still sounds like a rhythm — that’s the Melodic Rhythm! 🙂
