Hi! I’m Nate Savage and welcome to lesson 11 of the Rhythm Guitar Quick-Start Series.
In this lesson, I’m going to give you a couple of tips for dressing up your strumming
patterns. You know, playing the basic strumming patterns we learned two lessons ago is great but that
can get a little bit boring after a while. One thing that you can do to kind of change
things up is hit a single bass note. One tip that I’m going to give you here as a general
guideline to get started with this is to hit the lowest root note of whatever chords you’re
making with your single bass note. Instead of strumming that entire chord for the down,
down, up strumming pattern for the first down, you can hit just a low G note here on the
sixth string third fret and then finish the strumming pattern, so…
At first, it can be a little difficult to get your accuracy really good with this single
bass note stuff. What you’re going to want to do is actually look at the sixth string,
in this case, and just practice hitting it accurately and consistently. Once you have
that down, you can throw in the rest of your strumming pattern.
You can do this with all of your chords too. For example, if you wanted to do that with
your C chord, your open C chord, you can totally do that. Just remember for right now, when
you’re starting to learn to do this, your lowest root note should be your single bass
note. In this case, the C note on the third fret of the A string would be what you would
want to shoot for. This is just to get you started. You can throw other notes in too once
you get more comfortable with it. And the same thing applies if you’re using a
bar chord of this for example. If you’re playing an A bar chord using the E shape,
you would just want to start kind of getting used to doing this by hitting the lowest root
note of that chord, which is on the sixth string.
So go through all the chords you’ve learned here in the Rhythm Guitar Quick-Start Series
and try to apply this idea to them. It may take some time to develop this and get your
accuracy down with your pick, that’s totally fine. Here’s how a 1, 4, 5 progression using
this idea will sound with a jam track.
The next little technique that we’re going to go over to add a little more life to your strumming patterns is muted strums and it’s
a little bit easier for me to show you what this is than for me to explain it to you,
so let me do that right now.
So as you can see, by a muted strum what I’m talking about is when I come down on a particular strum, I’m muting the strings with the fleshy
part of my hand right here, right as I strum through them. It gives you a really percussive
sound and the idea behind this is to kind of emulate a snare drum, like what a snare
drum will be playing if it was playing with you. So on 2 and 4, if you’re in 4/4
time, on beats 2 and 4 throwing in a muted strum can give you a really cool percussive
sound. It makes you sound like a drummer is playing with you.
If you had your basic down, down, up strumming pattern… you could throw in a muted strum
on beats 2 and 4. And you don’t have to do that on beats 2 and 4. You can do it anywhere
you like, as long as is fits whatever song you’re playing. Once you get this muted
strum technique down, you can even throw it in with a single bass technique we were talking
about. Let’s do that. Let’s get our down, down, up strumming pattern again and apply
both techniques to this strumming pattern. So if you have 1 for your first down, you
can hit a single bass note. And then for your 2, you can hit a muted strum and then your
upstroke can be the full upstroke. So slowly, really slowly…
And that’s just one idea. You don’t have to do that every single time. You could do that
particular pattern on beats 1 and 2 and then on beats 3 and 4 you could do just a regular
down, down, up. Put both of those together for a new strumming pattern.
So pull up the jam track for this lesson. It’s the one with just drums and work on getting
these two techniques down. If you have to stay on the same chord throughout the entire
thing, that’s totally fine. Once you’re comfortable with these two techniques, you
can throw in some chord changes too and it might sound like this.
Thanks for watching this lesson. If you have any questions about these two techniques or
rhythm guitar in general, you can leave them here in the comments and I’ll get back to
you or you can email me nate@guitarsystem.com. In the next lesson, we’re going to check
out what you need to do next on your rhythm guitar journey. I’ll see you then.