I never imagined when I first started playing guitar I'd be one of those guys playing rhythm
guitar with my fingers. I was brought up in the pop rock genre where most everybody
played the acoustic and electric guitars with a pick. Now my favorite way to play
rhythm guitar is with my thumb and my index finger. The main thing that changes I learned
how to use my thumb and index finger to make a good sound, something that's crisp and clear,
not the dull fleshy sound that I imagined it would sound like
just strumming with my thumb. Let me give you a quick demonstration of what it can sound like.
That was a pop rock pattern used by bands like the Eagles. I used my nylon string guitar but I
could just as easily have used my steel string guitar and I could play many styles of music
with my thumb and my index finger including pop, rock, jazz, country blues and even the Spanish
flamenco style of guitar. Let me show you the basic technique and then you can apply that to
different patterns. I'm muting the strings in my left hand and let's take a look at the right hand
and focus on just the basic strumming technique. So the basic motion is I'm just going down,
up, down, up and that same motion is used for many patterns. It could be down, down,
up, up, down, up, or down, up, mute, up, down, up and so on.
The trick is to not just strum with the flesh part of the thumb or the flesh part of the fingers.
I'll strum with the flesh and you'll hear what it sounds like. It's not wrong. It's very soft and
is less useful for a variety of strum patterns but maybe for some soft jazz or folk it could work
but we're going to do it differently. For the down strum, we're going to use
the index finger on the outside, the nail portion. So we're going to strum down like that. Now on the
upstroke we're going to use the thumb but we're going to use the outside again, the nail portion.
You can hear already it’s crisper. It gets a little more of a bite down, up, down and up yeah.
Now like anything new it's going to feel awkward at first. So you'll want to practice it and little
by little get easier and smoother and it'll become almost like second nature after a while.
I'm going to give you a simple pattern to practice it with.
We're going to start with no chord and I'll show you the pattern. It looks like this down,
down, up, down, up, down, up. Another way to say that is to count it out
1 2 and 3 and 4 and. Now the number is on the down and the end is on the up so do this
with me right now. Nice and slow. I'll count. Ready hit it down, down, up, down, up, down,
up. So you're twisting your right hand a little bit and your elbow is making the down-up motions.
Let's try it with a chord. I'll make a G chord. Make any form that you want including a single
finger if you want to. Ready hit it down, down, up, down, up, down. Again 1 2 and 3 and 4 and.
Now once you start getting more comfortable with this you'll be able to do things like this.
Okay, I hope you enjoyed that and I know it's gonna take a little bit of
practice but trust me it's worth it. It's a technique you'll have under
your belt for years and years and you can have a lot of fun with it.
Hey if you like what I'm doing give me a thumbs up and if you haven't already
subscribed to my channel. Hey you'll notice I did something a little bit different at the end there.
You'll want to watch this next video right
here and I'll tell you more about that. Go ahead and watch the next video.