Hey there fellow guitar people. Do you want to know how to read strumming notation on the guitar?
Great! ‘Cause that’s what we're gonna do right now. Let’s do it!
Hi I’m Tomas from Real Guitar. If you’re into uplifting guitar lessons and real guitar advice
subscribe to my channel. When learning guitar, it's important to be able to understand and to
read guitar strumming notation. I’m gonna start with the basic notation that I used all the time.
And then I’ll go into some of the extra things that make the strumming even more interesting.
Keep in mind that all this information is best combined with practicing. I'm going to keep this
short so I don't overwhelm you with a lot of information that you can't put into practice
Much of strumming has to do with knowing when to go down and when to go up with the pick or with
your fingers. There are two common systems of symbols that could be used at the same
time. One is arrows and the other is letters. Now the arrows are pretty self-explanatory.
You pretty much go down when the arrow goes down and up when the arrow goes up.
The two letters that we use are D for down and U for up. So the down arrow would be pretty much the
same thing as the letter D for down strum and the up arrow would be pretty much the same as
U for up. There are some other symbols including the ones taken from classical music from
violin bowling but I'm not going to go into that because these are by far the
most common for guitar players. They're also the easiest to understand. I often use the
arrows when I'm writing a strum pattern on paper because it's easy and it's very clear.
I use the letters when I'm typing on the computer because that's more convenient.
The letters and the arrows are not enough by themselves. You need a way to know what the
timing is just because you went down you don't really know how long to hold it down there.
For that reason we use a numbering system that indicates which beat you're on as well as how
many beats are actually in that strum. Now you can see below that there are four beats in the strum.
The number indicates each beat and that plus sign indicates the other half of the beat. So if I were
to say one I'd probably strum down and AND would be up 1 and 2 and. If you're tapping your foot,
the number would be down and the AND would be on the up. It's a way
of dividing a beat in half. This simple strum would sound like this - 1 2 and 3 4 four AND.
In the early stages of learning, you can pretty well depend on when you see the number
that's where you're going to strum down and when you see the AND sign or plus sign
that's when you strum up. Now this is a learning type rule. It's something you
want to hold on to very loosely be prepared to let it go when you get more advanced.
So here's another pattern. Let me play this so you hear what it sounds like. It's down, down, up,
down, up and again 1 2 and 3 and. This pattern has only three beats
and we would say it's in 3 - 4 time, that top number the 3
means that there are three beats in each of these strums beats in each of these strums or measures.
When you say 4/4 time that means there's four strums in each measure. The thing about time
signatures 3/4 and 4/4 that's more important to know if you're actually reading sheet music but
it's nice to hear it once in a while. Now those were two very simple patterns. I'm going to go
into something a little more complex now. We're going to add a rest or pause into the strum.Take
a look at this pattern. You'll notice that there's one place where I'm actually moving down but I'm
not striking the strings. To indicate where that space is when I'm using letters I use a
little dash to kind of hold the space. By the way sometimes I have students just say the word skip
verbally to kind of keep track of when the pick is going down and they're skipping the strings
I will say that the letters and the arrows are not as clear as they could be. When I'm using
a pattern like this, I like to also throw in some standard music notation like this.
Here's what this pattern sounds like down down up skip up down up - 1 2 and 3 and 4 and.
That's a very common pattern by the way often used by pop rock type bands like the Eagles.
That line over the two notes is called a tie and it actually says that you don't
hit the second note but you let the chord ring out.
Now we come to what I call a mute and sometimes it's called a slap.
It's where you strike the strings and mute them and for that we use an X when we're using the
letters. When I'm using arrows I'll still usually put an X somewhere to indicate that's where you
mute the strings. It sounds like this --- this is ringing and a mute would be like that --- You
see I struck the strings but I muted them also. Here's a strum pattern with the mute and I'm going
to play it so you hear what it sounds like down, up, mute, up, down, up, mute, up faster it's - - -
Now I still find this a little bit unclear with just arrows or letters
and I often use regular notation to kinda add to the clarity. This is what it would look like with
notation. And again the notation is showing me exactly where the beat is and then I can use an
X to indicate the muting part. Even though I think the actual music notation part
makes it a little more clear if you know what the strum sounds like a lot of times
the arrows or the letters are enough. Now the final symbol I want to introduce
is called an accent. The accent tells you where to put a little more emphasis or a little more oomph.
I usually hit the strings a little harder for the accent. Here's a pattern that has the accent
on beats 2 and 4. I think this is sometimes called a back beat. It's that's considered
the weak beat 2 and 4 and it kinda gives it a little push 1 2 3 4 --- 1 2 3 4 --- 1 2 3 4
Accents can change up a groove considerably and you want to pay attention to them. It's
just a slight extra volume not really dramatic and the more you practice it the easier it gets.
So now in summary, we use the letters and arrows to indicate which way to strum.
The numbers indicate which beat or which part of the beat you're strumming on.
When there's no strum or a rest we're going to use a dash to indicate that. It is a little more clear
if you use standard notation along with the arrows to indicate those kinds of things and
an accent to indicate where to put some emphasis.
Thanks for hanging out with me. I hope you learned something today. If you did,
give me a thumbs up and if you like this video you're going to enjoy the next one as well.
I'll put a link up there, up there, no there. I'll see you over there.