hi my name is Lauren Bateman and I'm the owner here at lb music school and I wanted
to check in and follow up on our rhythm review that we did about the quarter
notes half notes and whole notes so I'm going to do is I'm going to give you two
maybe a little more strums that you can use for beginner
songs so at this point if you're talking about strumming if you haven't learned
any chords or anything you can just play the guitar open meaning don't fretting
any notes with your with your fretting hand and that's okay what might not
sound the best but if you can do that awesome if you know an E minor chord
which is two fingered chord we can use that for this as well so what we're
gonna do is talk about whole note half note and quarter note strumming so
quarter note strumming is usually the easiest way to start off in the
beginning because students can't change the chords that quickly so what we're
going to do is I'm gonna use an E minor chord I'm gonna change any chords on you
I might maybe help up a G chord in but first we're going to talk about
strumming so we talked about measures measures are sections of music and at
least for the simple talks we've been discussing we've been counting to the
number for each measure has four counts so if I'm we're gonna use a whole note
strumming pattern to play a song it would sound something like this
three four one two three four two three four
so I'm strumming once and I'm letting the chord ring for four measures so if I
add a G chord in here and I use the strumming again and I hold each chord
for one whole note it would be one two three one two three four
one two three four so that is our whole note strumming so now if we want it to
get into half note strums so say your chords are starting to get a little bit
quicker you think you can go a little bit faster well we're just gonna play
half notes instead of whole notes so that would sound something like this if
I just use an E minor chord to start if I decided to throw in a chord change I'm
gonna use AG chord here I would go
so each strum is going to get or sorry each chord is going to get two strums
now the hardest one not because it's hard and it just depends on how fast you
can change your chords so as you get quicker you might be able to throw four
strums in per chord for each measure so that would be our quarter notes and that
would sound like this
now if I were gonna throw in a chord change back to that G chord it would
sound like this
now if you find that doing four strums per chord is too much if four quarter
notes is too much you can always just do three and then pause and give yourself
time to change chords what do I mean well let me show you so for this next
strumming powder if you're not quite fast enough to do the four strums per
measure what you can do is do three strums per measure and give yourself one
count to change chords so if I were going to start with E minor could be
for I think I gave you an extra storm on that last E minor but in general that's
what you do so you would just strum three times 1/3 and when you say four
you don't strum you actually use that to give you enough time to switch to the
next chord so those are the strumming basics for guitar I usually stick with
these strums with my students for quite some time until they can get their chord
changes up my recommendation is to get your chord changes to a hundred beats
per minute that means you can change between one chord a hundred times on a
on a metronome so you would set your metronome to 100 beats 100 bpm it's kind
of like miles per hour in a car you would set that to a BPM of 100 and it
would click and it would be like click
until you get to that point I wouldn't advance your strumming any
more than that so that is your basics of counting and strumming with the guitar
for beginner songs
lost somewhere in this space