Play the Bossa Nova for Guitar in 5 Easy Steps

The bossa nova is one of the most popular Latin styles and one of the most fun things we can play on guitar. This is a style that is more often than not played on nylon string and offers a great "crossover" opportunity for classical and Spanish-style guitarists.

In this tutorial, we will break down the bossa nova into five progressive steps to get you playing this awesome rhythm as quickly as possible. To begin, we won't even use a chord at all so that we can focus on the right hand. Our thumb will play the low E (6th) string, while our index, middle, and ring fingers will play the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd strings respectively. 

Our first step is quite simple and shows us an essential element of the bossa nova beat, which is having our bass notes occur on the 1st and 3rd beats:  

As we count to four (we are in 4/4 time but you may also see bossa novas notated in 2/4 time), we can fill out those blank spaces from step one by playing a simple block chord (in this case three strings played simultaneously) on the beats we didn't play before:

The next step is purely conceptual. We are going to say the word "and" to mark the spaces between each beat as we count evenly through the measure:

Now that we know where all of the 8th note are in the measure, we can play block chords on the last three 8th notes. We're almost there!

 Finally, don't play when we say the number 4 and we've created the bossa nova sound:

This 5-step process should get you quickly playing this rhythm and also counting it out which is very important. The bossa nova is its own musical world and this is just the beginning so I encourage you to explore this rhythm further and look for other common bossa patterns. You'll also need to get some jazz chords under your fingers, and pretty soon you'll be playing an awesome Brazilian guitar style.