Dynamic Rhythm Guitar
Six shifts that turn your everyday strumming into music that makes a stranger stop and listen.
$199 · one-time · lifetime access · 60-day “Level Up or Your Money Back” guarantee
Watch · 4 min
You hear the same E minor, C and G most players know, played flat… then played with real dynamics. The gap between the two is the whole course.
Chris wasn’t going to buy anything that day. He was just killing an afternoon, wandering the store with no real plan.
But the acoustic room pulled him in, the way it always does. You know the one. The everyday guitars down at eye level… and up along the top row, the ones that cost more than his first car, hung up high where you have to really want it to reach.
There was one up there he couldn’t stop looking at. A Gibson. He’d glance up, tell himself no, then catch himself glancing up again. Way out of his range. But the room was empty, and it was just hanging there, and… ah, what’s the harm.
He checked over his shoulder. Nobody. So he reached up, heart going a little quicker than he’d ever admit to, and lifted it down. It was heavier than he expected. The kind of guitar that makes you sit up a little straighter, and play like you actually mean it.
He sat down, settled it against his chest, and played a couple of chords just to hear it… that big, warm bloom a good guitar makes in a quiet room.
And then he forgot where he was.
He just played. That little thing he’d been working up at home, the one with the bass note that walks down underneath and a fill that slips in between the changes. Not performing. Not thinking. Just playing.
He never heard the door open. He didn’t even notice the older fella who’d wandered in and gone quiet behind him… not until the man spoke, and the words landed somewhere right in the middle of his chest:
“Now THAT is how a guitar ought to be played.”
Here’s the part I love.
Chris is one of my students. He bought his first guitar twenty years ago, full of hopes and dreams, like we all were. Then life did what it does, and it ended up in a closet, gathering dust. He only dug it out again last year. He came that close to never bothering.
And that little progression… the one that stopped a stranger in his tracks and pulled those words right out of him? He learned it from this course.
He was just four sections in. Out of fourteen.
The problem
You can play. I mean that honestly. You’re years into this now, with a couple dozen songs in your hands and chords that change clean. Nobody who heard you would call you a beginner.
But you hear it on the nights you record yourself. You hit play, waiting for the thing that lives in your head, and what comes back is a shade smaller than that. It’s tidier. It’s more correct. And it’s somehow not quite what you hoped for. Some quiet part of you sinks, because you know the difference even when you can’t name it.
And late, once the house has gone still, the old thought wanders back in the way it always does. Maybe I just don’t have it. Maybe some people are born with the thing that makes a guitar sing, and I got skipped.
Let me say this as plainly as I know how: that is not what’s going on. It never was.
The players who make a room go quiet aren’t carrying some gift you got passed over for. They’re making a handful of small choices nobody ever bothered to show you. Where the bass note walks down underneath a chord. When to ease off so the chorus has somewhere left to climb. How to drop a single run into the gap between two chords and slip out again before anyone notices.
That is all feel really is, up close. It isn’t magic, it’s a stack of plain decisions… and decisions can be learned.
Every course you ever bought taught you what to play. Chords, scales, songs. And you learned them. But knowing what to play and knowing how to make it land are two different worlds. One fills your head. The other fills the room.
So hear me, because I mean every word of it: you were never short on talent. You’ve just been missing the controls. Put them in your hands, and the player you’ve spent twenty years chasing finally walks in… and it’s you!
The shift
Think about the last movie that really got you. It opens quiet. It takes its time. Then it starts to build… and build… until one moment lifts you clean out of your seat, and then it sets you back down gently and lets you breathe. It rises. It falls. That is the shape we are built to crave, in a film, in a song, in just about anything that moves us.
Nothing stagnant ever moved a soul. And that flat, even strum you’ve leaned on for years is about as stagnant as it gets. It doesn’t rise. It doesn’t fall. It just sits there in one place, no matter how clean the chords are.
Here’s the good news. The fix was never more chords, and it was never more songs. It’s learning to put that same rise and fall into your own two hands.
A strummer plays the chords a song is built on, and stops there. A player with these six shifts decides how the whole thing feels. Whether the verse comes in hushed and close. Whether the chorus throws the doors wide open. Where the groove sits, when to thread a line of melody through the middle, and when to lift a hand off and let the song breathe.
It’s the same six strings. It’s the same chords you already know. The job your hands are doing is completely different.
That’s the whole shift. It isn’t a stack of new songs to copy. It’s the control to take the songs already in your hands and finally make them rise, and fall, and sound like music.
I’m Jonathan, and I’ve been teaching guitar online since 2009. I should tell you up front that I’m not one of those one-percent players who picked it up in an afternoon. The first time I tried, I quit after two months.
What turned it around for me wasn’t talent. It was a teacher who actually explained why things worked instead of just handing me another song to learn… and a buddy whose rhythm playing was so alive it took me years to figure out what he was really doing with his hands.
Dynamic Rhythm Guitar is all of that, finally laid out in order, so you don’t have to spend the years I did working it out the hard way.
What’s inside
Each one is a small thing you do with your hands that changes everything coming out of the guitar. I’ll tell you what each one does. The how is waiting for you inside. Watching one of these finally click for somebody is the whole reason I still do this.
The moment your strumming hand stops simply keeping time and starts driving the whole song. Almost everything you call “feel” traces back to a single thing right here that nobody ever tells you to do on purpose. Start doing it and people notice from across the room.
Two guys play the same chord… One rings out rich and alive, like a record. The other sounds like a practice pad. It’s not the guitar, and it’s not the chord. The first player uses a trick so small, but so effective, you’ll be a little annoyed nobody ever pointed it out before.
Your strumming quietly grows a melody of its own. There is a way to let single notes slip out over the top of your chords and weave through them, without the groove underneath falling apart, and it is the move students write to tell me about more than anything else in the course. Most people never suspect a rhythm player can do it.
There’s an empty half-beat sitting in nearly every bar you already play. Learn what to drop into it and your rhythm starts answering itself back, like there’s a second part going that wasn’t there before.
The day the fretboard quits being a grid of memorized dots and turns into a map you can actually read. Why certain chords belong together in a key, why some progressions feel inevitable and others feel wrong, what the notes under your fingers are actually doing to each other. You can’t force this moment. But once it lands, you can’t un-see it.
There is a whole layer of sound sitting inside the chords you already know, and you have been playing straight past it for years. Once you find it and learn to land there on purpose, the chord stops sitting there and starts saying something.
And here’s the part I love. Any one of these will make you sound better on its own. But they don’t just add up… they multiply. Each one makes the next land harder, the way a bassline, a groove, and a melody stop being separate parts the moment they lock into a pocket. Work all six and you don’t have six shifts any more. You’ve got dynamic, engaging music.
What it sounds like
There’s a moment that’s coming for you, usually a couple of weeks in. You won’t plan it. You’ll just stop thinking about any of this and reach for it. You’ll let a verse go quiet without deciding to. You’ll catch that one note inside the chord and… oh, it rings. You’ll drop a little run between two changes and it’ll sound like you meant it, because by then you will.
Picture it like this. You’re somewhere outside one evening, there’s a fire going, and someone hands you a guitar. And you just play. The song goes low and quiet to start… then it starts to build… building… and then you slip a riff in between the chords and the whole thing opens up, and the night gets a little quieter around you.
And somebody standing nearby, someone who wasn’t even listening, goes still.
That’s it. That’s the moment the guitar quits being a thing you operate and turns into a thing you play.
The breadth
Let me be honest with you about the twenty hours, because it’s the thing people ask about most, and it has nothing to do with padding. There’s almost no repetition in here. It’s 187 lessons across 14 sections, so you’re never sitting down to a four-hour block. You pick one up, put it down, come back tomorrow. All laid out sequentially, each one building on the last, so you’re never lost. It’s just deep, and it’s broad.
And I don’t just show you a thing once and move on. Each one gets taken apart slowly, from a few different angles, until it’s a habit instead of a fact you half-remember. That’s the whole difference between knowing about something and actually being able to do it on the fly.
And there are dozens of ideas like it. Strumming, real theory, flatpicking, hybrid picking, chord moves, substitutions, half-bar riffs, intervals, the whole business of building a groove… each one taught slowly and properly, until it’s actually yours and not just something you watched me do once.
And here’s why this is the smartest place you could ever put that time: something like ninety percent of your playing is rhythm. The solo, if you even take one, is a handful of bars. The solo, if you even take one, is a handful of bars. So this isn’t some small corner of your playing we’re fixing in here. It’s very nearly all of it.
I genuinely don’t know where else you could go and get all of it in one place. That is what the twenty hours are. It’s pretty much everything I know about making a guitar come alive, finally laid out in the right order.
And if you’re wondering whether twenty hours is worth $199… private guitar lessons run $50 to $70 an hour depending on where you live. To get this same material from a teacher, you’d need 80 or more hours and somewhere between four and five thousand dollars. And most of that time wouldn’t even be instruction… it would be small talk, warm-up, watching you practice. Every minute of this course is distilled, and intentional.
The specifics
A handful of the things you’ll walk away able to do, and this is barely a sliver of it. There are twenty hours inside.
Who it’s for
This is for you if you can already play a few open chords and hold a steady strum, you’ve been at it a while, and you’re tired of every song coming out sounding the same.
It’s probably not for you yet if you’re brand new and still wrestling your first chords. Start there, then come back. And if you already think in dynamics and bass movement and thirds without trying, well, you don’t need me, and I’ll happily tell you so.
Reviews
Now I’m doing cool chord progressions even changing key (ha, I didn’t know keys were so important!) I’m doing things I’d only seen others do and wondered how! I’m very grateful to you for opening a gate to the path of guitar heaven! The buzz from learning and actually playing (not copying) is immense.
My key learning has been the major and relative minor relationship. Suddenly the modes, the CAGED system, the scales all fit together logically. Wow! I’m in wonderful new territory with my playing.
I was looking for a course that could help me learn how to make music with the guitar, not just give me things to play. I saw the video of you playing in the course preview and immediately knew… I want to be able to play like that! The course has 100% lived up to what I hoped.
For a veteran player like me, it helps to widen the scope of guitar playing and refresh the music theory skills.
I have spent a small fortune on guitar lessons on the internet. Downloads, DVDs, PDF course books, you name it and I’ve acquired it. All a waste of time: thin on content, poor delivery and inferior documentation. Not now since I found JB’s web site and lessons. They stand head and shoulders over the rest.
I am 62 years old and have been playing since I was 11 years old. I always let my picking hand lead me to where it wanted to go. Now I understand why it did it.
I am 71 years young, so am going slow, but I am playing so much better. I could play open chords and some bar chords but I am very happy with how it’s going.
I’ve been playing for about a year and found myself no longer progressing. Your courses have moved me to a new level and I’m having so much fun! I appreciate that you fully explain all concepts. Now I understand theory! I feel like I’m getting personal lessons.
For the first time in my life I understand theory, the hows and whys. I never really knew that music was actually a science. It all fits. It all makes sense. I love knowing about it!
Your course Dynamic Rhythm Guitar is absolutely unbelievable. I am only up to DVD 3 and it has made a lot of difference to my playing. Your style of teaching is also very good, not like some others who just want to ‘show off’ how good they are playing their screaming loud shreds.
Notice what none of them are saying. Not one of them suddenly grew faster hands, or found the talent they were missing. They got the controls… and the music came right along with it.
If you go through this course and don’t feel your playing improving, if you’re not leveling up, just email me and I’ll refund every penny. No hoops. No hassle.
Jonathan
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What's included 14 sections and about 20 hours of video · 151-page workbook · drum tracks at 60, 75 and 90 BPM · “rubber room” practice videos · jam tracks with bass and drums · lifetime access · email and Q&A support · 60-day money-back guarantee
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FAQ
That’s the thing I hear most, and it’s almost never true. Feel isn’t a gift you’re born with, it’s a set of choices, and choices can be learned. If you can strum a few chords in time, you’ve already got what you need to start.
Most of my students are somewhere between 50 and 70. This was built for the player who’s already put in the years and just wants the rhythm to finally catch up to all that time. It is genuinely never too late.
If you can play a handful of open chords and keep a steady strum, you’re ready. The course meets you right there and builds from the ground up.
Both. This is about the choices your hands make, not the instrument they’re making them on. All of it transfers either way.
It’s all online. Watch on any device, go at your own pace, and ask me your questions right there on the page. You’ve got lifetime access, so there’s no clock running.
The plateau you’re on isn’t permanent. Give it an hour or two a week… there’s a year’s worth in here, and it’s built for exactly that pace.
Your hands already know the chords. Come on. Let’s go teach them the music.
$199 · one-time · lifetime access · 60-day “Level Up or Your Money Back” guarantee