One SIMPLE CONCEPT will FIX Your Strumming and RHYTHM
In today’s lesson, I’m going to teach you a simple concept that will fix bad strumming and rhythm.
The concept is simple:
- You wave your arm down and up
- You make contact with or avoid the strings
That’s all there is to it!
We’re going to practice strumming with some exercises designed to help you develop your sense of rhythm.
We begin with a little bit of a warm up, we’re going to calibrate our arm by simply strumming down and up over and over again. As we do this we can count the strokes ” 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + “
The numbers are the downstrokes, the “+” are the upstrokes.
We want to focus on relaxing and producing smooth steady counting and moving our arm steadily.
Eventually, we want to stop counting the “+” and just counting “1234,” while still performing the same motion with our arm so you can think about it as four down ups.
Once you can do this. You simply need to miss the strings a couple times here and there, and you will create patterns.
Don’t believe me?!
I demonstrate that there are three components that make up pretty much any strumming pattern. We use these to recreate the most common strumming pattern ever. We learn to play it, first by saying it.
Once you can say it rhythmically, you simply tell your hand to do those motions as you move it down and up. And then, if you can, instead of saying the motions, count “1234”, placing one of those three components to each number.
Finally, I quickly show you how to deal with longer strumming patterns and how eighth note counting transforms into 16th note counting.
Take care, see you next time!
-James
