Strumming and Patterns

If you are anything like me, strumming the guitar with your strumming hand while changing chords with your fretting hand will seem like you are trying to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time in sync. Don’t fret (no pun intended), it will quickly become easier. Probably one of the best pieces of advice I found when I first started learning to play was to concentrate one either your fretting hand during a practice session or your strumming during a practice session. Focusing on what you are currently trying to practice is more important than trying to make it all work together at the same time. For example if you are practicing a new strum pattern, practice it while not changing chords. Once it comes naturally, then introduce changing chords.

When first learning to play a few songs, I actually pretty much stuck to down strokes for strumming; in fact at the very beginning I was simply using one down stroke per measure. This allowed me to concentrate on the chords and changing between the chords. Yes I know, this sounds boring and everyone wants to be really good right from the start. But unfortunately we are all not musical geniuses.  Before you know it, you will be ready to move on to real strum patterns.

Speaking of real strum patterns, let’s cover a couple common strum patterns that you will want to become familiar with. I have found that most songs I can play with one of these.

STRUM 1

The first strum pattern and one that I have used probably the most is

DOWN DOWN  UP          UP    DOWN   UP

There are a lot of songs that you can play with the above strum pattern. A couple songs that were among the first I learned were Last Kiss and Brown Eyed Girl.

STRUM 2

This next strum pattern throws in another concept besides just ups and downs. It is the accent. What is the accent do you ask? An accent can be done a couple of ways. The first is to simply strum the strings louder and the other way is to strum only some of the strings on the non-accent strums so in essence you get more sound from the accent strums. Below I will represent the accent strums as long arrows indicating strum all of the strings and the non-accent strums with shorter arrows indicating strum only some of the strings. Depending on the song you may want the few strings on the non accent strums to be the lower toned strings and some songs you may want to use the higher toned strings. In the future we will talk about more strum patterns where this notation may be more useful because the below is a very simple strum pattern but it is also widely used.

 All      Some      All     Some     All      Some      All     Some 

A couple songs to use that all down with every other accent strum on are Heart of Gold or Let It Be. 

STRUM 3

Ok, now so you don’t get to relaxed and think you have this whole strumming thing down, let’s throw in a slightly more complicated pattern.. 

DOWN DOWN DOWN UP     UP DOWN   DOWN UP DOWN UP

This last strum pattern is also relatively common. A fairly popular example of a song that uses this pattern is Every Rose has its thorns by Poison.