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Basic strumming struggles

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(@rahul)
Famed Member
Joined: 18 years ago
Posts: 2736
 

Strumming ?

You may take the patterns or not , but , what works best for me is to pull a walkman inside my ears , listen to the guitar in the song , and play along with it.

Somehow after a bit of practice , the hand automatically does what it is supposed to.

You may also try tabs , but , it can lead to frustation , when you are not able to transform each and every D and U on the strings.

Best of luck ,

Rahul


   
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(@songbird543)
New Member
Joined: 18 years ago
Posts: 4
 

Hi, I am new to this forum but just wanted to let you know that the article Strumming for Beginners by Matt Guitar (is that his real name?) https://www.guitarnoise.com/lessons/strumming-for-beginners/ was the best thing I have read relating to strumming. When I read it, I thought it had been written especially for me. At 43 I was starting to think I was silly trying to learn the guitar and thought that I had absolutely no rhythm and would never get the strumming thing - until I read this article - it really changed things for me. It's a great article and is humourous as well. It made me realise that it is impossible to try and learn chords and strumming at the same time. You have to learn one and then the other. And... I also discovered that I DID have rhythm - well it is better than I thought anyway. :lol:


   
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(@matteo)
Honorable Member
Joined: 19 years ago
Posts: 557
 

hello all
strumming at the beginning is difficult except for a few lucky ones but the good news is that almost everyone could become a decent strummer with a good amount of excercise. I spent a lot of time to learn a lot of different patterns and even if I can play them very well, still i'm not satisfied and I regurarly try to learn new ones to apply to already known songs. Anyway I guess that the problem is twicefold:

a) to learn to play a few patterns
b) to understand on which kind of pattern a song is based on

The problem is that at the beginning you do not have any idea how a pattern should sound so it is very important to have a tutional cd or Internet site where you could listen how a pattern should sound and sound-files to use as backing tracks. If you learn a few patterns you could see that after a while you will start to recognize the patterns you had learnt (or some similar ones) when played in other peoples' songs.

My advice is to start slowly trying to learn at least a pattern for each of the main songs resolutions:

a) eight notes resolution
b) sixteen notes resolution
c) triplets resolution

The first eight note pattern to learn is du/du/du/du which means that every time you tap the foot you play a downstroke and every time you raise the foot you play an upstroke (also don't forget that four foot-tapping equals to the four beats measure). When you can master it it is time to leave a few strokes and learn

D/D/du/du

and

D/du/u/du

which are widely used in rock music

Then you can play some embelisshment (like a bass note, alternate bass and strum, anticipation etc.)

Sixteen notes are a lot more difficult to master since you have to play a quick donw and up each time you tap your foot and a quick down and up each time you raise your foot. Start with a slow song and try with a pattern like

dd/ddu/dd/ddu

but only after you can play eight notes with steady rhythm

Triplets feel is typical of blues and it is quite difficult to learn: the best thing to do is to listen to a lot of blues records and try slowly after you have a solid grasp on the other kinf of rhythms.

When you can play sufficiently well a few patterns (a tutional cd is higly recomended),you could create your onw ones

Cheers

Matteo

p.s. send me a pm if you wish: I had your same difficulties in the past


   
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