You can make a guitar rhythm sound and feel completely different depending on what you play to it. Here, we will take a shuffle and modulate it by shifting one beat early and playing the rhythm as straight 8th notes.
Here is a video demonstrating this concept. The change happens after the fill coming out of the shuffle and shifting before the last pulse (I’ll explain below). Note that the guitar rhythm does not change.
If you think of the notes played by the guitars as a succession of pulses, we group them together a certain way for shuffles (A shuffle is a group of triplets where you only play the first and last of the three notes; a total of 12 pulses per measure). Here is the guitar rhythm.
And here is the drum beat played with it.
To shift to the new modulation, end the first rhythm one note early, so there are only 11 pulses instead of 12. I did that with a fill by counting in 6 and 5 pulses. (So, instead of the grouping of note-rest- note, now we have note-note-rest.)
And now think of these as straight 8th notes. The new rhythm looks like this.
And here is the drum beat played with it.
When appropriate, this kind of modulation can take a song in a completely different direction.
