Upgrade Your Funk

This entire lesson is going to be based on an E7 chord, but we’re going to make it sound absolutely epic by stacking these 4 different tips together, one after the other.

Getting Started

Before we get started, we need some understanding of funk rhythm and techniques, so I invite you to look at our Funk Essentials Level 1 if you feel like this is one step ahead of where you are.

The essence of what we’ll be playing is based on E7, which we’re going to play like this:

We’re also going to need a pattern to get started. Of course, the whole point is to play around with it and you should feel free to experiment, but Dan plays this as the core pattern for the lesson:

The first step you should try is to play this E7 over the pattern we’ve just seen, with a metronome or drums at 90 BPM like Dan demonstrated. Make sure you feel confident with this before moving on! The more confident you are with this, the easier the next few steps will be.

Tip One - Encircling

“Encircling” is the idea to use notes around the chord shape we’re on to add colour to our pattern, creating a bit of tension that then gets released.

Starting from E7, you could play Eb7 or F7, a fret lower or higher. The shapes we’re using for Eb7 and F7 are exactly the same as for E7, just a fret up or down the fretboard.

To play around with this idea, you can follow the same pattern we’ve played before, but this time, try to play either Eb7 or F7 at the end of the bar. That allows you to land back on E7 on beat 1, which will release the tension we’ve created by playing a fret higher or lower at the end of the previous bar.

Once you start developing a feel for it, you can start adding more tension. For example, you could play a whole bar a semitone below, which would of course result in a more tense pattern, but as long as your rhythm is solid and you land back on E7, you’ll be fine!

Tip Two - Extensions

So far, we’ve only played a simple dominant 7th chord, but we could add extensions to this chord. Extensions are notes we add to the chord to change its colour, and we’re going to look at three different extensions: the 9th, 13th and 11th.

Let’s look at the essential extensions of the chord we’re playing. The first one we’re going to play is E9, where we add a 9th on the G string. We can also add a 5th on the high E string, which is a classic funk shape!

Then, let’s dive into the E13. We’re now going to add the 13th to our chord, which is a 6th but up an octave.

As you can see, the 9th is still present in our E13, and that’s because a dominant 7th chord is named only after the highest extension present (in that case, the 13th). So we can stack extensions as much as we want, but of course, on the guitar, we usually have to omit notes as we only have 6 strings!

Let’s keep on looking at some other extensions. We’re now going to change our hand position to be able to play another E9, as well as an E11.

These last two extensions can also be great to add a melody element to our rhythm, and they work really well when played one after the other. Once you’re confident with these different shapes, try to combine them with the encircling idea that we developed before!

Tip Three - Altered Chords

Altered chords are another option to add new colours to our E7. The idea is to raise or lower one or more notes to add tension. Here, we have two examples with E7#9 and E7b9.

It’s important to spot how the name of a chord tells you exactly what’s going on inside of it. For example, if you know how to play E9 that we’ve seen before, you can see how E7#9 (AKA the Hendrix chord!) is just like E9, but we raise the 9th by a semitone. And of course, to go from E9 to E7b9, we just lower the 9th. Easy!

Using these altered chords, we almost create a new chord progression, but realistically, all we’re doing is altering our base E7.

When encircling your E7 with altered chords, a nice little trick is to use a #9 when you’re a semitone higher, and a b9 when you’re a semitone lower. In that case, that would be Eb7b9 and F7#9.

Tip Four - Lead Lines

And of course, we can now play lead! The idea is to keep the groove going, so we want to keep the same rhythm but on scales this time. Remember that rhythm is king!

A good way to get started is using the E minor pentatonic in the same hand position we’re playing our E7 in. That means we have shapes 3 and 4 of E minor, and targeting the lower “half” of the shape is a good way to get started as it will allow you to land on E7 when you want to.

As you can see on the diagram above, you can also use the notes between the notes of our pentatonic scale. These chromatic notes can sound great if used well, and will definitely help you land on the note E to play E7 on time. Think of them as passing notes, and keep in mind where the notes of the scales are.

Depending on how confident you are with your fretting and strumming hands, you can either keep on strumming and target the notes you want in your lead, or switch to plucking the strings individually with the pick. Again, the most important part is to land back on your pattern with E7 when needed.

In Conclusion

You can see here how even if we’re just limiting ourselves to one chord, these little tips can help you sound confident and groovy. The goal is eventually to combine all of these tricks, whenever you want to, but of course, there’s no rush! Spend as much time as you need on each one of them.