Alright again, we are going to learn about strumming today and this video is specifically supporting the guitar lessons that you can purchase from your guitarstage.com, and if you can get it without getting the E book that I have on there, that the E book talks about strumming, on how to read charts, how to play your chords correctly whole nine yards. But if you get it without great, if not, check out the E book there at your guitarstage.com and without further a do, let us keep going.
So, what we are going to talk about today is strumming and how we should think about strumming when we are playing. One would think that it is just as easy as just up and down. Well, we need to think about the beat, the beat, your down beat is when your foot hits the ground, so, we had a strum, this little 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, that is when I put it on the ground, this are down beats. When our foot is coming up, that is called an up beat. When we have a down strumming and not strumming as well and we will want this to be intended or right on top of each other. Guess so, let say we had a song that was just down beat. Now, for this exercise and by the way, on that E book, you will find a whole series of different types of strums that you will find through country, rock, bliss, also its music and it is a great practice, so I do not include that here, just cannot fit it all in but I am going to show you how to apply this. And so to say, we are playing quarter notes. For all these exercises and the exercise that are in E book as well, what I want you to do is take your left hand or your fretting hand if you are lefty. You take your fretting hand; lay it on the strings as light as a feather, so that when you do strum, you just keep that kind of percussive sound. We do not want to be concentrating on the chords or anything like that. Okay, so laying hands on the strings like that, what you want to do is, we are just going to do the first few here. We have down strums, use the quarter notes, so, 1, 2, 3, 4, so that quarter note, that is my foot you hear. If a quarter notes are that 2, 3, 4 and our strums are simply like this. Well, you notice that our hand is coming up as well, have to come up so it can go down. And when I hit the string during that time, that is called the ghost strum. So, when I am coming up, I am not hitting the strings, I am just passing by, okay, that is called the ghost strum. Now, if I want to hit them all, I just hit them, so, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Simple enough, right? Well, when you start getting into up beats and say living some upbeats out and that sort of thing, you can get a little weird and you are going to hiccup, you know, hiccup, what I mean is hiccup on the guitar, you are going to be like hitting an up strum where there is a down beat in that sort of thing. You do not want to do that, you want to be a real disciplined in your strumming. It does not take long to learn this basic style of strumming but you really want to make sure that you go through all those studies and make sure that you get it down. In this way, the one thing you have to do is listen to a song and you will be able to do it pretty immediately. So, you know, it looks like a song like let us say Good Riddance by Green Day and that song goes.
Now, for some of you who maybe able to just do that right away, that is great. This lesson is for those that cannot get that yet. You will notice that my hand is, you just look at it and turn the audio off, it would just look like this. Just looks like it is going up and down but in fact you hear a rhythm in there but if you look at my hand, just looks like it is going up and down. Well, that is because I am trowing in a bunch of ghost strums in there but it is a very specific pattern unless you practice it slowly and methodically you are going to be all over the place. So, for something like that, you know, you can do like 1, 2, and, and 4 and 1, 2, and 3, 4 and 1, 2, and, and 4. So you notice that I am missing some of those. Okay, now once you get that field down, you want to do it slowly, all this strumming rhythms you want, you slowly at first. And just get in the groove of it, do not worry about the chords, just get in the groove about this strum. You know, what I gave you there was the first one on the list and the last on the list. So there is all sorts of stuff in between and I think that, that list is on the guitar lesson there, I think it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 or 15 different rhythms. And it goes progressively from easiest to hardest and what you will find is that you got reggae, D rhythms, you have got rock, country, blues, all of them and they are all going to be based on this skip notes. So, again just dig in and do not worry about playing the chords yet but go though the rhythms slowly, your numbers will always be on the down and your end will always be on the up. So, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and, alright. Check out the guitar lesson at your guitarstage.com and keep tuning in.
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