Trying to understand this rhythm part for classical gas guitar

[Roy C]

I’ve been playing a tab of classical gas for a while now but i never really stopped to study the rhythm. Now that I have started, I can’t make any sense of it. I’m not a beginner, but I can’t even assign where the main beat is supposed to fall. If someone could help me it would be greatly appreciated.

I’m trying to fit it on ‘1 e And a 2 e And a 3 e And a 4 e And a’ but I know there are ‘Tri-O-let’ in there so if you could tell me like: first ‘0/3rd’ string is on ‘1’ and ‘0/3rd’ is on ‘4 beat Tri’ or something like that i would understand it.

*Note that this is the first of many post because there are many measures I don’t understand in this piece
Thanks in advance
Best regards

[sunjamr]

I’ve seen several complete tabs for Classical Gas, and none of them were 100% accurate compared to the original version. So I gave up on it and learned Angie as played by Paul Simon instead.

Sunjamr Steve

[brian-belsey]

I was looking for a good analysis of Classical Gas a while back and the best one I found on Youtube was by Carl Brown/Guitarlessons365. He takes it apart and looks at it in detail – this might help.

[Jean-Michel G]

Hi Roy,
“Classical Gas” is a challenging piece from a rhythmic perspective, because it has many irregularities. Tommy Emmanuel makes it even more complicated…

The Intro of “Classical Gas” is globally in 3/4, not 4/4. The second bar is essential a half note G chord followed by a quarter note F# in the bass. You can of course add all the ornamentation you see fit, but keep in mind that we are in “walz time” here.
Bar 8 is in 4/4 though, with beats 2, 3 and 4 played as triplets. Bar 9 is alos in 4/4. Bar 10, the last bar of the intro, is in 2/4.
And then comes the main part, globally in 4/4, but with many irregular beats in 5/4, in 6/4 and in 2/4…
Good luck! 😉

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