Guitar How-To

How To Strum A Guitar

How to strum is one of the first stumbling blocks for new guitarists. When you look at sheet music for a song, the guitar chords are written over the song’s lyrics, so that shows you where to strum but nothing on the music shows you HOW to strum. The answer to the question of how to strum a guitar is in two parts – finding strumming patterns to suit the song you are learning and how to use the muscles in your hand and arm to make these strumming patterns. Let’s take these two aspects separately.

You can find the strumming pattern for your song by listening to it on the radio or on a CD. You might be surprised how well even a newbie guitarist can pick up how to strum the accompaniment to a song. Try this first and fool around with it for a while before trying the next way to get stumming patterns which is to type “guitar strumming patterns” into a search engine. Try the search using the quotation marks, this will give you pages with the exact phrase. If you type the phrase in without the quotation marks you will get thousands of pages where the words of the phrase appear in different parts of the page. If you use Google you will see the words of your search appearing in bold type. Whichever way you use, you will get plenty of basic strumming patterns that you can use to practice your guitar chords.

To learn how to strum a guitar it is advisable to stick to songs that you are already familiar with. If you can sing the words in your head, try hearing the guitar in your head as well. If you start with songs that you already know and love, that will make learning to strum so much easier.

So far I’ve mentioned finding the strumming pattern that is on the recorded or published version of the song, but there is nothing to stop you from making up your own strumming ideas. Just play around until you find something that sounds right. You could even try some playing of single notes for variety. Remember, if you are having fun, even your mistakes can sound okay. I think Eric Clapton said something like, “if you make a mistake, do it a couple more times so the audience thinks it’s part of the song”.

If you have a song that you want to learn how to strum to, a good trick is to work on the strumming for a while without worrying about the chord changes. This way your strumming hand will get into the rhythm very quickly if you are not distracted by trying to change chords.

A good start for learning how to strum is to just do a simple up and down alternating pattern. If you can count a four beats to the bar rhythm in your head, you can strum: DOWN UP DOWN UP. Then try a slower bear which you count as ONE AND TWO AND THREE AND FOUR, where the ANDs are the upstrokes and the counts are downstrokes. Once you get your hand and arm moving, you will find that learning how to strum a guitar is not so hard. Oh, and remember to take a minute to let your arm relax every so often.