Hey there fellow guitar people. If you're a beginner, strumming with your thumb can
be a great way to get started. You see you don't worry about the pick flying out of your
hand and you can concentrate on getting the chords right in your left hand. But is strumming
with your thumb only for beginners? If you answered No, you'd be right. In reality, this
is a powerful little pick and it can be a part of a more elaborate fingerstyle strumming,
something that I use all the time.
I'm going to show you the proper technique for starting out with using your thumb and
then I'll show you two techniques that you can use to up the game a little bit and have
even more fun. Let's do this.
I'm going to start with the simplest version of the thumb strum. I'll use the D chord in
my left hand and I'm gonna strum down with my right hand, the fleshy part of the thumb.
Now with the D chord, I'm strumming pretty much from the fourth string up. It's okay
if you hit the fifth string. Sixth string is not part of the chord so going down is
pretty easy. You'll notice by the way I'm not going too far because even that little
distance there means you have to come all the way back up so you want to go just a little
past the first string and then back up. Now most of the action there is from my elbow.
I'm not doing much with my hand other than moving my thumb down a little bit. Now for
the up strum we're going to also brush on the upper part of the thumb with the flesh
so it's down, up. So a good way to practice this is just to make a chord. In this case
I've got a D chord and just try to do it nice and even. I'm moving my thumb a little bit
but most of the action is in my elbow.
The trick here is to brush against the strings and not dig in too tight. If you do that each
of the individual notes sounds and that's okay that's an arpeggio if you want that.
But for the strumming you want it to brush against the strings and take some practice.
This is a particularly good strum if I don't want to play too loud. So here's a basic strum
using that technique down, down, up, down, up.
Now
for this next technique we're going to up the game a little bit and we're going to create
a little more interesting strum. You're going to brush down with the flesh just like you
just did. I'm still using a D chord but on the way up you're going to use the outside
of your thumb and the nail to create a little different sound. It's crisper, cleaner. By
the way this technique is also part of a more complex strum that uses both the thumb and
the fingers which I have created a separate video if you want to get more into using your
whole hand for strumming. So we're going to go down with the flesh and up with the nail.
Now to do that you're going to twist your hand a bit. You see on the way down, I twist
this way and the way up it twists out. I'm closing my fingers and my thumb a little bit.
Now with that same strum before it sounds like this down, down, up, down, up, down,
up, down.
Now for technique number 3, we're going to add bass notes and this is a cool way to kind
of make the strum more interesting but still not terribly difficult. You'll see it's fairly
easy to find the bass note with your thumb more so than with a pick. But the key there
is you need to know what the bass note of the chord is and this is something that it's
important to learn. And by practicing with your thumb you'll get the hang of it after
a while it'll be second nature.
I'll go through three common chords and show you the bass note. We'll start with the G
chord and the bass note’s the sixth string. A C chord and the bass note is on the fifth
string and then the D chord and the bass notes on the fourth string. So with the bass notes
you'd hit the bass note and then strum. Bass note strum. And if you want to make it a little
more fancy add some base walks. in between.
So if you’d like so if you'd like to learn more about strumming with your thumb and your
fingers I’ll link to a video at the end that I think you really like.
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Hope to see you again in the video soon and in the comments below. Bye for now.