Guitar Strumming for Beginners

Learn to add percussive strumming to your rhythm playing. David walks you through the basic technique, step by step, with audio examples.

Nick Minnion concludes his three-part series on solving timing and rhythm problems with a look at playing various eighth note, triplet and sixteenth note rhythms.

In Part 2 of “The Learning Curve of Various Styles of Guitar,” Jamie Andreas looks at the skills needed to become a “strum and sing” guitar player.

While everyone will agree that using a metronome can help you develop and improve your rhythm, it is far more important for any musician to learn how to internalize the rhythm of a song or musical piece. Nick Minnion examines ways to help you do just that in Part 2 of “Solving Timing and Rhythm Problems.”

Whether you are a guitar teacher or a self-taught guitar player you are likely to come across problems related to playing in time and interpreting rhythm. In this series of articles TeachGuitar.com’s Nick Minnion looks at where these problems spring from and what can be done to address them.

If you know how to read notation, specifically the rhythm values of notation, you never have to worry about figuring out strumming patterns because everything is spelled out for you. In this lesson, we’ll use the main guitar parts from Jack Johnson’s song “Taylor” to demonstrate how easy strumming can be.

It’s time to explore what to do when we get around to playing with another guitarist. So here we start out with a simple arrangement for two guitars.

In this podcast we’ll work on getting the basics of the summer camp song “Puff The Magic Dragon” down, plus have a little fun with the bass line.

If you’re going to play an emotionally charged song, you can’t hide behind a single strumming pattern. Comfortably Numb is one of the highlight songs from Pink Floyd’s The Wall and we have arranged it for a single guitar, using many strumming and crosspicking techniques we’ve gone over in our Guitar Noise Podcast series.

Let’s finish our look at “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” by looking at a slightly more complicated strumming pattern as well as learning about a new voicing of the G7 chord.

In this podcast we’ll continue to explore how to sing and play at the same time, using “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” as our example.

In this podcast we’ll take a look at getting comfortable with strumming with an eye toward being able to sing and play at the same time.

In this podcast we’ll make an arrangement for the last half of the verse and also do something fun with the chorus of the old Irish folksong, “The Star of the County Down.”

Our latest podcast begins a look at the Irish folksong, “The Star of the County Down.” Not to worry – we’ve prepared a “cheat sheet” for you.

In this podcast we’ll make use of rests, combining them with simple arpeggios to create space while strumming, especially in slower songs.

This podcast gives us an introduction to some very important strumming techniques – anticipation, dynamics, and using rests as part of a strumming pattern.

Let’s wrap up our work with the traditional song, “Streets of Laredo,” one that some of you may recognize from Johnny Cash’s “American Recordings IV.”

In this podcast we’ll look at creating walking bass lines from D to G chords. We’ll also start to tackle the “chorus” section of this song.

Guitarists nowadays think of rhythm in terms of “up” and “down,” the motions of strumming, instead of thinking of rhythm in much simpler terms – numbers and counting. In this, the first of a series of four articles, we begin to hone our strumming techniques so that any rhythmic pattern will be within our grasp.

In this podcast we’ll start with a basic ”bass / strum” in 3/4 timing and then add some fancier work to both the bass and the strumming.