Lesson 2: The Strum

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[PART 1-THE BAISCS] L1: Terms & Supplies * L2: The Strum * L3: The 5 Basic Chords * L4: Playing 1st Song
[PART 2: DIGGIN’ IN] Guitar Tuning * Music Theory * Transpose * More Chords
[PART 3-PLAYING BASS] Playing Bass.
[PART 4-SONGS] Songs

The Strum

Speaking of the strum. We begin our guitar playing by learning how to have a proper strum. There are dozens of strum patterns. We are going to use one that is simple and can be used in most songs. Once you have this strum perfected, you can experiment with others. Since the guitar is a rhythm instrument (it keeps the beat like a drum set with the strum), you can vary your strumming according to the song's rhythm.

You begin by placing your left hand (if you are right-handed) over the strings on the neck so as to muffle them. Position a pick in your right hand, between your thumb and index finger, pointed toward the strings. You will then need to move your right hand over the strings in an even motion without touching the strings. This motion needs to be even, like a pendulum. You will want to keep your wrist partially stiff and move your arm with just a gentle twist of the wrist. Eventually, the wrist will do most of the strumming. But that will come after a sense of rhythm has been established.

As you move your hand over the top of the strings, without touching the strings, you will want to move closer to the strings so as to touch them at selected times. If you never touched the strings, you wouldn't have any sound at all. If you touched the strings on the down motion as well as the up motion all the time, it would sound mechanical and loud. So we are going to learn when to touch the strings and when to miss the strings.

The basic strum pattern is DOWN, DOWN, UP, UP, DOWN, UP. The motion of your hand will be going in a constant and even horizontal swing (DOWN, UP, DOWN, UP, DOWN, UP, etc.) Imagine your arm is the pendulum of a grandfather clock (only horizontal). You can’t stop or you will stop the time of the clock. The same with guitar. Without stopping you begin by touching the strings going DOWN, but miss them as you come UP. Keeping the same motion without stopping, you will then hit the strings DOWN, and then strum them as you move UP. You will then miss the strings as you go down but touch them as you go back UP. Finally, you will touch the strings as you move both DOWN and UP. That is one strum segment.

I will illustrate this by bolding and capitalizing the strum that you touch the strings, and lower case and normal font for the times you don't.

DOWN, up, DOWN, UP, down, UP, DOWN, UP

Let’s practice

Step one: With your left hand (right hand for lefties) muffling the strings, start the pendulum motion with the strumming hand, moving up and down, and not touching the strings. Now with the pick, strike the strings on a down motion, make a muffled sound AND KEEP GOING WITHOUT STOPPING THE EVEN STRUMMING MOTION… UP, DOWN, UP, DOWN, UP, ETC. It will look like this:

Down – strike the strings