How to Play Acoustic Guitar: Dead Strum

The next section on this is what I like to call the dead strum. Now, a dead strum is just a strum across the strings and you have to mute the strings (Guitar demonstration). How you mute that is, you have to relax your fingers of your left hand and create a dead or muted sound like so (Guitar demonstration).

Now, when playing the open chord, you have a couple of different ways that you can do this. Let us say, for example, we are going to start with the C chord, you can lean your fingers over, almost like you are making a mistake or what I like to do is just take my pinky or relax the pressure of the strings. So, have this (Guitar playing) especially when you have open strings, you are going to have some strings ringing through there. What I like to do is take my pinky and just barely touch the strings. Do not put any pressure on the fingerboard, just enough. So, that you got this created.

So, we might play something like this, (Guitar playing) chord (Guitar demonstration) dead strum (Guitar demonstration) chord, (Guitar demonstration) dead strum (Guitar demonstration). The chords that we are going to use for this dead strum thing are the (Guitar demonstration). Now, with the dead strum, slow, we go (Guitar playing) and as we quicken it up a little bit, it is going to sound like (Guitar playing).

Now, once again as I said, be creative. You might want to do something like (Guitar playing). So, let us say we played one strum or with four dead strum (Guitar demonstration) and if we did that quickly, it will sound like this (Guitar playing). You are only limited by your own creativity. So, experiment and move those dead strums around and mix them up with the regular strums and see what you get (Guitar playing) all kinds of good stuff.


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