Hi,
I've been playing for about 4 months and am trying to learn more interesting strumming. Could some kind soul please help a beginner out. This is a cover of the song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm0nokGcLOA
I love this song and can play the chords, but not the strumming. Ignoring the first 15 second intro, how do you make the strumming pattern for the rest of the song?
Thanks in advance
Josh
First off, welcome to Guitar Noise.
You can make things a lot easier on yourself by not focusing on the strumming pattern and instead focus on the rhythm of the song. This song is in 4/4 time, which means that we'd count it like this: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
Now, normally we go down on the beats (the "one," "two," "three" and four") and up on the offbeats (the "and" between each beat). So, if we were to strum every beat and off beat, it would be like this:BEAT: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
STRUM: D U D U D U D U
This is obviously not what's going on here, but simply by listening (or in this case, just watching) you can see where he's dropping out of the strum:BEAT: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
STRUM: D D U D U
The only thing he's doing different than what I've written here is that he's playing a single bass note (usually the root note of the chord) on the first beat. It's also important to note that he's only using the higher strings on the final beat-and-a-half.
Most of this you'll learn yourself by listening and exploring and experimenting. If you're really interested in the topic of strumming, you might want to check out the Guitar Noise Podcasts, which are all about strumming. You can click at the link on the top of any page here at our website.
Hope this helps. Have fun with this one.
Peace
Thanks so much. I practiced this morning and it sounds pretty good.
