How to Strum and Sing at the Same Time Video

By: Guest 7 months ago

Thanks, tapping my foot was indeed of great help on off-beat strum patterns!

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By: Guest 11 months ago

Thank you soo much!! I have been Having trouble with this for sooo long what a break through!!

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How to Strum and Sing at the Same Time

Hello guys! Well this ones a change isn’t it? Face to face at last, and later on my cool session, it would be the shoes, we’re going to come and show it too. Anyway, this video came about because a number of you have been Mike and I for information about, you know “How can we strum and sing at the same time?”, because it’s a very difficult thing that we’re asking ourselves to do. We’ve got to have the right arm moving in one rhythm, plus the voice singing in a different rhythm. So if you’re finding it difficult by beating yourself up, you’re not alone, lots of people find that difficult. And Mike always makes the point that no one ever really has to decide to be a singer. There are some great guitarists who decided early on that they couldn’t sing and didn’t want to sing. Jimmy Paige, Carlton Knight, even Eric Clapton had been playing for a long time before he decided that he was prepared to sing. So, you know, that’s what I knew you could go down. Those guys tend to be lead players, they’ll play the flashy guitar solos, but if you want to be a strummer and a singer, and certainly if you want to be a song writer, being able to sing is invaluable. So, we’re going to try and give you a couple of tips and hopefully it will help you on the way, and you know if this finally sounds still difficult, feel free to get me an e-mail and we’ll see if we can help you out doing it. I’m going to use two songs as examples to help us on the way, and the two of the songs that we saw in the 20 easy guitar videos. First one is “I don’t want to talk about it.” The key to singing and strumming is to feel where the beat is. And to be able to strum, and sing successfully, you have to feel where that beat is in music all the time. Now, when we strum “I don’t want to talk about it”, we strum on the beat, every time like this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. That’s on the D7 chord by the way, which where we would start that song. Now, what you want to do is you want to practice that down strum pattern, every time you strum down like that, tap your foot on the down strum, so it coincides with the down strum. Check this out. And your tap should coincide with the down strum. Let’s do that together one more time. I’m going to count to 10 this time, ever wondered why musicians count into a song 1, 2, 3, 4. It’s because they’re establishing where the beat is. Let’s do that, we’re going to go, 1, 2, 3, 4, strum down, 3, 4. That would be a bar of D7. Okay, with “I don’t want to talk about it.” We’ll strum that D7 as our intro, and on the 4th beat, we’ll come in with the words “I can” 1, 2, 3. “I can tell by your eyes that you probably been crying forever, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3,” and as we would carry on with that. Tap your foot where the strums go down. Okay, have a go with that with “I don’t want to talk about it” And then when you’re feeling comfortable with that, I’m going to throw one more into the mix. When songs stop to strum, what we call off the beat as I mentioned before, that means where some of the down strums are missed and we play upstrokes. It becomes more difficult, because upstrokes are coming as your foot moves up. Let me show you what that means. So, if you’re going to strum this pattern, down-up, down-up, down-up, down-up. The down should be as our foot taps down, and our up should be as our foot comes up, like this. That was 1, and, 2, and 3, and 4, and foot above. Sometimes that we miss the down strokes, now one of our favorite patterns is this one. You may well be familiar with that pattern already. I’m going to count the beats out, even though we’re not strumming every single one of them. Here we go.1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. Before you worry about trying to sing “Stand By Me” make sure that you can play that pattern, and tap your foot, and or, count the beat as you’re playing it. The first stage is to be able to tap your foot on the beat. Okay, that is the secret, trust me. Now when we come to sing it, the lyrics, the singing comes off the beat as well. Let’s start it nice and slow. “When the night has come, And the land is dark, And the moon is the only light we see.” So, if you’ve got your foot tapping, and the strum pattern down, you’re ready to start trying to sing. So, don’t worry if it takes a little while to get down, and don’t worry if you’re not able to sing straight away. Trust me, the thing to do first is to get the foot tapping as you strum. If you could do that, you will be home and dry. And this will be one of the biggest breakthroughs for you. Now, listen, while I’m here I’m going to throw one more thing at you. Nothing particularly to do with singing and strumming at the same time, but this one other question that we get asked all the time which is “Why isn’t my strumming sound the same as yours in the videos?” Try a little experiment with me, first of all get this idea on your mind, when we strum, we want the wrist of the strumming hand to be as loose as possible, and I mean incredibly loose so that if you tilt it all over the wrist will literally fall over, you know it’s that loose. Now try something for me, hold your pick in your thumb and first finger and grip it hard, and feel what happens to your wrist. Does it, or does it not completely lock up? Grip it like that, and start to strum, and do you or do you not get this kind of sound? If the answer to that is yes, the secret is to really relax the grip on the pick, I mean so much that you feel that you’re going to drop it, I can’t emphasize that enough. You hold it so loosely that you think you’re going to drop it, and when you strum, you should feel that as you strum down, you feel the pick give in your fingers. Do you see that bending back, maybe you can’t at that angle, it bends back. You’ll feel the pressure of the pick as it bends against the thumb. You’ll feel it push against the thumb as it comes through the strings, and when you do it up strum the reverse will happen and you’ll feel it applying pressure to the part of the index finger. And in that way you get a brushy sound instead of the feeling of dragging the pick through the strings, and we feel that pick moving every time we hit the strings. Okay, couple of top tips for you there, I hope to help you. If you’re still struggling with any of that, as always, drop me an e-mail, we’ll get you sorted out.

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Hello guys! Well this ones a change isn’t it? Face to face at last, and later on my cool session, it would be the shoes, we’re going to come and show it too.

Anyway, this video came about because a number of you have been Mike and I for information about, you know “How can we strum and sing at the same time?”, because it’s a very difficult thing that we’re asking ourselves to do. We’ve got to have the right arm moving in one rhythm, plus the voice singing in a different rhythm. So if you’re finding it difficult by beating yourself up, you’re not alone, lots of people find that difficult. And Mike always makes the point that no one ever really has to decide to be a singer. There are some great guitarists who decided early on that they couldn’t sing and didn’t want to sing. Jimmy Paige, Carlton Knight, even Eric Clapton had been playing for a long time before he decided that he was prepared to sing.

So, you know, that’s what I knew you could go down. Those guys tend to be lead players, they’ll play the flashy guitar solos, but if you want to be a strummer and a singer, and certainly if you want to be a song writer, being able to sing is invaluable. So, we’re going to try and give you a couple of tips and hopefully it will help you on the way, and you know if this finally sounds still difficult, feel free to get me an e-mail and we’ll see if we can help you out doing it. I’m going to use two songs as examples to help us on the way, and the two of the songs that we saw in the 20 easy guitar videos.

First one is “I don’t want to talk about it.” The key to singing and strumming is to feel where the beat is. And to be able to strum, and sing successfully, you have to feel where that beat is in music all the time. Now, when we strum “I don’t want to talk about it”, we strum on the beat, every time like this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. That’s on the D7 chord by the way, which where we would start that song. Now, what you want to do is you want to practice that down strum pattern, every time you strum down like that, tap your foot on the down strum, so it coincides with the down strum.

Check this out. And your tap should coincide with the down strum. Let’s do that together one more time. I’m going to count to 10 this time, ever wondered why musicians count into a song 1, 2, 3, 4. It’s because they’re establishing where the beat is. Let’s do that, we’re going to go, 1, 2, 3, 4, strum down, 3, 4. That would be a bar of D7. Okay, with “I don’t want to talk about it.” We’ll strum that D7 as our intro, and on the 4th beat, we’ll come in with the words “I can” 1, 2, 3. “I can tell by your eyes that you probably been crying forever, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3,” and as we would carry on with that. Tap your foot where the strums go down. Okay, have a go with that with “I don’t want to talk about it” And then when you’re feeling comfortable with that, I’m going to throw one more into the mix.

When songs stop to strum, what we call off the beat as I mentioned before, that means where some of the down strums are missed and we play upstrokes. It becomes more difficult, because upstrokes are coming as your foot moves up. Let me show you what that means. So, if you’re going to strum this pattern, down-up, down-up, down-up, down-up. The down should be as our foot taps down, and our up should be as our foot comes up, like this. That was 1, and, 2, and 3, and 4, and foot above. Sometimes that we miss the down strokes, now one of our favorite patterns is this one. You may well be familiar with that pattern already. I’m going to count the beats out, even though we’re not strumming every single one of them. Here we go.1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. Before you worry about trying to sing “Stand By Me” make sure that you can play that pattern, and tap your foot, and or, count the beat as you’re playing it. The first stage is to be able to tap your foot on the beat. Okay, that is the secret, trust me. Now when we come to sing it, the lyrics, the singing comes off the beat as well. Let’s start it nice and slow.

“When the night has come,
And the land is dark,
And the moon is the only light we see.”

So, if you’ve got your foot tapping, and the strum pattern down, you’re ready to start trying to sing. So, don’t worry if it takes a little while to get down, and don’t worry if you’re not able to sing straight away. Trust me, the thing to do first is to get the foot tapping as you strum. If you could do that, you will be home and dry. And this will be one of the biggest breakthroughs for you.

Now, listen, while I’m here I’m going to throw one more thing at you. Nothing particularly to do with singing and strumming at the same time, but this one other question that we get asked all the time which is “Why isn’t my strumming sound the same as yours in the videos?” Try a little experiment with me, first of all get this idea on your mind, when we strum, we want the wrist of the strumming hand to be as loose as possible, and I mean incredibly loose so that if you tilt it all over the wrist will literally fall over, you know it’s that loose.

Now try something for me, hold your pick in your thumb and first finger and grip it hard, and feel what happens to your wrist. Does it, or does it not completely lock up? Grip it like that, and start to strum, and do you or do you not get this kind of sound? If the answer to that is yes, the secret is to really relax the grip on the pick, I mean so much that you feel that you’re going to drop it, I can’t emphasize that enough. You hold it so loosely that you think you’re going to drop it, and when you strum, you should feel that as you strum down, you feel the pick give in your fingers. Do you see that bending back, maybe you can’t at that angle, it bends back. You’ll feel the pressure of the pick as it bends against the thumb. You’ll feel it push against the thumb as it comes through the strings, and when you do it up strum the reverse will happen and you’ll feel it applying pressure to the part of the index finger. And in that way you get a brushy sound instead of the feeling of dragging the pick through the strings, and we feel that pick moving every time we hit the strings.

Okay, couple of top tips for you there, I hope to help you. If you’re still struggling with any of that, as always, drop me an e-mail, we’ll get you sorted out.

Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services