learning to strum

Now we're gonna have some fun! Good strumming is one of the most difficult things for the beginner to grasp. It's easy to just bang away on the guitar and make it sound something like what it's supposed to. That's not going to get you very far, and when you get right down to it that method doesn't sound very good.

The trick is to keep your hand moving constantly. This seems very odd at first because sometimes your hand will be moving without hitting any strings, which would appear to be a waste of motion. Really, though what this does is turn your strumming hand into a rock-solid pendulum which cannot and will not be swayed from it's mission of keeping steady time

You will notice that we are using some different looking notes in this example. These are called eighth notes, and look like this:

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When two or more eighth notes are grouped together their stems will be linked together like this:

At this point we should all be very comfortable with playing quarter notes. If you are not, you should not be working on this lesson. You should instead go back to Lesson Five in the Beginning Lesson Directory and return here when you are ready. Quarter notes are counted one note per beat, 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 -. Eighth notes are twice as fast as quarter notes and are counted 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and.

For now in all of the lessons we've done you have used only downstrokes with your picking hand. Now we are going to begin to work on the upstroke. The upstroke will occur on all of the and beats I told you about in the previous paragraph. The steady down-up-down-up motion creates your pendulum. Here is the universal symbol for a downstroke:

And for an upstroke we have this:

You will also begin to see notes that are bound together using ties. Here's what I mean:

What you do here is play the first eighth note (beat 1) with a downstroke. Then play the second eight (the and) with an upstroke. The note we just played is tied to the next note, which means that we do not play the note on beat two. However, as I said earlier bring your hand back down as if you had played the note. Then you will finish up by hitting the final note with an upstroke. I have provided an example of this technique which will utilize everyone's old friend the bouncing ball. Your hand should move up and down at the same rate as the ball does. The chord progression in the example is G-C-G-D. By the way, you'll need a Flash player to view this, and lots of other things that will be coming to this website, and the internet at large. If you don't have one click here to download one for free! Good luck and have fun!

"jeff, you have to be your own favorite guitar player."-tony redman