I’ve often had students come to me and ask to learn new strum patterns.  I understand what they want to learn and, of course, we do learn some strum patterns.  When we are talking about strumming we want to go deeper than just learning a few mechanical patterns that we can pull out on demand.

I don’t know about you, but I can say for sure that my brain doesn’t process things quickly enough for me to consciously think, “down-up, down-up, down-up” while I’m actually try to play a song.  The real thing we want to get a handle on, and what we’ve been considering as we’ve discussed time in music, is learning to feel the beat of whatever song we’re playing and then coming up with a pattern that makes the song interesting.

As we do that we are able to move strumming process to the subconscious level of our thinking.  Then we can expend more mental energy on the higher levels of musical organization like harmonic structure and melody.

To get to the point where strumming is subconscious we need to spend some very conscious effort working on it now.  On the STRUMZZ DVD there is a long “play-along” section that takes you through all the basic strum patterns.  Here is the secret to all of them:  Keep your hand moving up and down.  This is so important I’m going to say it again:  keep your hand moving up and down.

Underlying every strum pattern is an up and down hand motion based on the time value of the shortest note in the pattern.  For a whole note pattern you do one down stroke for every four beats.  For a half note pattern it’s one strum for every two beats.  For a quarter note strum you have one down stroke on every beat.

Even though each of these patterns only use down strokes, we need to pay attention to something that is so obvious that we don’t notice it:  for every down stroke there must be a corresponding up motion to bring our hand back to the beginning position.  This upward motion comes into play once we start dividing the beat in two.  For eight note strumming patterns the up and down motion of our hand remains constant.  We can potentially contact the strings eight times in one measure.  That much strumming can get very tedious pretty quickly so we need to decided which notes we want to thin out. That’s what we’ll work on as we get into the play along part of the disc.  Regardless of how many times we contact the strings our hand motion stays the same. The thing that changes is when we actually contact the strings.

As we getting our strumming hand going up and down our arm is actually mimicking the motion of an old wind up style metronomes.  Most metronomes these days are electronic and simply go “beep, beep, beep.”  The older design of mechanical metronomes has an arm that goes back and forth so that you can see the travel time of each beat.  If we can think of our strumming arm as becoming a kind of human metronome it will help us keep our strumming flowing smoothly at the right tempo.

Just a quick word about how strums are notated in tab (tablature).  It’s a little counter intuitive.  An up-arrow indicates a down stroke and a down-arrow indicates an up stroke.  The reason for this is that in tablature the 6th string, the lowest sounding string is the bottom line of the tab.  To move from the lowest sounding string to the highest would require what looks like an upward motion on the piece of paper – going from the lowest sounding string to the highest sounding string.  In real life it is a downward motion since your hand is actually moving toward the floor.  In the same way a down-arrow would mean you hand is moving from the highest sounding string to the lowest sounding string.  This is just one more example of the upside down thinking that is sometimes required to learn to play the guitar.

OK, put your hand over your heart and let’s say it one more time together:  “keep your hand moving up and down.”  This will assure that your strumming is as smooth as possible.

By keeping our strumming hand moving it prevents us from trying to strum the melody.  How would it sound if we tried to strum the melody of “Jingle Bells”.  (demonstrate a strum for every melody note).  Hmmm not too good.  It sounds little jerky, dis-jointed, doesn’t convey a steady sense of rhythm.  A simple quarter note strum would do a much better job. (demonstrate with quarter4 notes). Not a fancy strum but it has a nice steady sense of motion that lets you know it is going somewhere.  The thing to always keep in mind is that our strumming hand is the time keeper, the thing that keeps the song moving forward.

In the play along part of the disc we will explore many of the strumming variations that can be developed by using this simple up and down motion.

This concludes the blog posts on this topic. Hope you have found them helpful!