Perry Brooks Nichols's video: A Rhythm Lesson on Reggae for Classical Guitar featuring Maya Henry

This is an excerpt from a Zoom Lesson with my talented student of 3 years, Maya Henry. Maya is one of my youngest students and is a very adept sight reader and Beatles fan. She has learned many of the songs from "The Complete Easy Beatles" and can strum them with a consistent downstroke, but I wanted to find a way to help her develop her upstroke. I decided that teaching her the Reggae rhythm might help us towards a breakthrough. The Reggae rhythm is entirely based on the upbeats and is usually played on the guitar with an upstroke of the pick so that the highest notes of a chord pop. In classical and fingerstyle guitar the most emphatic upstrokes are produced by an upward movement of the thumb striking the strings from 1st to 6th by turning the wrist similar to giving a quick "thumbs up gesture" with a bit of fingernail to give the strike crispness. One of Maya's favorite songs from "The Complete Easy Beatles Book" is "Let It Be." She can play it quite well in the traditional 4/4 ballad manner. Since the song is the same chord progression as Bob Marley's reggae masterpiece "No Woman, No Cry," it seemed like the natural choice for her to develop this new rhythmic style and work on her upstrokes. After she showed some facility with the simple upstroke pattern on the upbeats, I encouraged her to develop an extra 16th note downstroke following the upbeats of the 2nd and 4th beats of the measure, which some more complicated reggae songs have. Once she showed the ability to play this pattern I showed her the difference between Reggae and popular contemporary "Reggaeton" rhythm. Reggaeton often has an extra 16th note following the upbeat of the 1st and 3rd beats of a measure which gives the groove a bit more of an aggressive push versus the laidback feel of reggae. Maya is getting quite facile with her strumming and will soon be able to take on more complicated patterns like Rumba and flamenco!