Strumming Skills Exclusive Mini Course (DAY 2)

In today’s lesson we will focus purely on strumming patterns and organising them so you can call on them at will. Day 1 was all about rhythm so check that out if you haven’t already.

It’s often easy to say with anything that attitude is important, but with strumming it really is. By having a good attitude I don’t mean anything hokey like “be positive with your strumming”, that’s not really advice.

What I mean is, be prepared, structured, plan and think about your strumming. Thinking about things such as strumming patterns is a huge deal.

Strumming Patterns!

There are millions of songs out there, but only a limited amount of core strumming patterns used in these songs. Often these core strumming patterns are used over and over with the odd little variation.

What you need to do is listen for all the major strum patterns you hear in all the songs you listen to, and then learn them and apply them wherever you can.

Get to the point where you can play at least 5 different strum patterns from 5 different songs you know and play them at will. Then once you are comfortable with those strum patterns, experiment with them.

There are two powerful things you can do to really understand the strum pattern.

1) Learn other songs that use those strum patterns

2) Experiment with ideas of your own. Try using the strum pattern with some different chords and try increasing or decreasing the tempos. Even add a capo. Doing this is fun, and is often how many of my students start writing the foundations for their own songs.

Importantly in relation to strumming this sort of experimenting helps solidify the strum pattern in your head and helps you get to the point where you are completely comfortable playing the strum pattern.

Once you can do that you will have the strum pattern mastered and you will be ready to go and conquer it in many other songs – either those of others or your own.

At some point you will come across one of the strum patterns you know and hear a variation of it.

Instead of worrying, you will simply adjust your strum one strum at a time until it sounds like the original. This is made 1000x easier when your rhythm skills are really good. (Another reason to master your sense of rhythm).

Let’s learn a very cool strum pattern that you can and will use time and time again. It’s called the ‘Piano Strum’.

The following video is taken from my new course (coming soon) but you don’t have to be on the course to understand the video or learn the strum pattern.

This is a really useful strum pattern especially for when you are taking a song that isn’t played on guitar originally but is played on piano.

It also works as a great go to strum pattern when you either want a ballad-esq sound or a driving eighth note rhythm.

There are multiple songs that use this strum pattern or can use this strum pattern. Listen to any driving piano songs such as the intro to Oasis ‘Don’t Look back in anger or the song Black Roses from the T.V. series Nashville.

I teach both of these songs regularly and we employ this strum pattern in both – during the intro of ‘Don’t look back in anger‘ and during our rendition of the song Black Roses.

Action Plan

Once you have learned the above strum pattern, now it’s a good idea to make a list of all the strumming songs you know how to play.

Do this either on paper, a word document, Evernote or wherever you like. This is a very important step. Once you have done so:

• Play through a short section of the first song and listen for the strum pattern you play. This is strum pattern 1. Write that next to the song on your list.
• Play through the second song on the list and notice the strum pattern. Is it different to the first one? If not, write down strum pattern 1 next to the song on your list. If yes, write down strum pattern 2 next to the song on the list.
• Play the third song on your list and go ahead and repeat for each song making note of the strum patterns used for each song.
• You should find that if you know, let’s say 20 songs, there will be about 5-8 different strum patterns you play.

If you are using 20 different strum patterns, you may not be playing guitar in the most efficient way so far. The aim here is to spot the same strum patterns for each song you play.

Most guitarists don’t learn strum patterns. They will learn a song and try to replicate the rhythm of the song just by winging it each time. This is a really poor way to improve your guitar playing.

Look for the same strum patterns on your list and make them part of your core strumming arsenal of patterns.

Then, any time you hear a song that has that rhythm, you will instantly be able to play the rhythm.

Also, any time you are stuck with what to play when jamming or writing you have your bank of strum patterns to call on.

Once you see that a song has the same strum patterns as another song you have learned it will save you lots of time.

That’s it for today’s very important lesson.

Stay tuned for something cool in the next video!

Click here for a recap of Day 1

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Can’t wait for day 3? Click HERE to get it now.