Hey, how you doing? Justin back with you again for a chat
about missing down strums; now, that I kind of alluded to in
the intro. This doesn't sound like it'd be very difficult, right?
Especially if you're just doing down strums or I said to you,
"Okay, we're gonna miss the third down strum in the bar."
And you're going, "Okay, I can do that." Like, ONE, TWO, three, FOUR.
ONE, TWO, three, FOUR. Give it a little go.
Try and grab the guitar up right now, see if you can follow along with me.
We're just gonna strum the strings on one, two ---on beat three, I want you to
move your hand down, but not strum the strings and then, back again for beat four
So you go: one, two, miss, four. One, two, miss, four.
One, two, miss, four. One, two, miss, four.
Not particularly difficult, is it? …miss, four. One, two, miss, four.
Now, the key element here is that the hand keeps moving all the time.
When you're strumming, you wanna train your arm up to be really, really
super-consistent so it doesn't stop moving. Now, again, this is a big ask.
For many beginners, that'll be a really difficult thing to achieve, but that's
what you're aiming for. You don't --- you wanna lose any sort of disjointed
feeling. It wants to feel really, really smooth, like, it's a kind of a pendulum.
Just nice, relaxed movement with the hand that's completely continuous.
Now, we already worked on last week; I hope you practiced hard for pattern
One, two-and-three-and-four. One, two-and-three-and-four.
And, I think, I alluded to the fact that, that was an important strumming pattern
because of something we're going to do this week and what we're gonna do this
week is miss beat three out of that pattern. So, the pattern is gonna to be:
ONE, TWO-AND-three-AND-FOUR. ONE, TWO-AND-three-AND-FOUR.
Down, down-up, miss-up, down. Okay, now we're going to spend
a little bit of time talking about this. We're going to spend a bit of time
actually doing it together. This is the most common rhythm pattern used in music
Okay? If you play guitar, you've heard music that's got guitar in it. You've
heard this strumming pattern. It is, really really popular because it sounds
really good. That's not a bad thing. It would be my recommended strumming
pattern to start off with. No matter what song you play, this pattern will probably
work. There are times where it doesn't work. Of course, there are some songs it
won't suit but, if you can get this strumming pattern down, and practice it
lots of different ways, lots of different tempos, lots of different songs, it'll
really hold you in good stead anytime you learn a new tune. So, really, I think this
is worth spending a lot of time on it being, you know, really making sure you get this down
properly. So let's start nice and slow, just one, two, three, four. Start off with
that. …two, three, four. This is a lesson that you should be playing along with me.
If you haven't got your guitar in your hand, pause the video, go grab your guitar
and join in. It'd make it a lot better for you, okay? So we're just using the
muted strings again for strumming practice, and we are just strumming
One, two ,three, four... but we notice that the hand-move is moving consistently all the
time. So, it's actually already going down-up, down-up, down-up, down up.
Even if we're not strumming the up. Now we're going to move into doing that
pattern that we talked about last week. So it'll be: one, two-and-three-and-four.
Down, down-up, down-up, down. That's one, two-and-three-and-four.
One, two-and-three-and-four. Okay? Just keep it nice and slow.
One, two-and-three-and-four. One, two-and-three-and-four.
It's worth doing a little bit of this. Don't be in a hurry. …three-and-four.
If you count it out loud as well, that can really help; if you count along with it:
One, two-and-three-and-four. One, two-and-three-and-four.
Okay, one more and now we're going to move to new pattern where we miss out the three
ONE, TWO-AND-----AND-FOUR. ONE, TWO-AND-miss-up-FOUR.
ONE, TWO-AND-three-AND-FOUR. ONE, TWO-AND-three-AND-FOUR.
That's down, down-up, miss-up, down. Down, down-up, miss-up, down.
ONE, TWO-AND-three-AND-FOUR. ONE, TWO-AND-three-AND-FOUR.
ONE, TWO-AND-three-AND-FOUR. Last one: …., TWO-AND-three-AND-FOUR.
Now, this kind of repetition is really, really important when it comes to
strumming patterns. As soon as you try and apply the strumming pattern to songs, it
gets a whole lot more complicated because you're thinking about the chords, and the
strumming, and the timing, and the words, and the singing. Well, there's so many
different things to be thinking about so when you're practicing strumming, I really
recommend this idea of just muting the strings. If you want to do it with a
metronome, that's a really good idea at this point and it'd have to; it depends on
how comfortable you're feeling with the metronome. If you're finding that really
difficult, you might have to do a bit of extra work, doing a real simple strumming
pattern. Like, just four down strums with the metronome, and getting used to that.
If you're feeling like, "Yeah, I'm kind of cool with this," then you wanna have a go,
trying to play these patterns along with the metronome between, say, 80 beats per
minute and 100 beats per minute. Probably not too much faster, unless you're feeling
super confident, or slower, 'cause slower actually gets hard as well because when
you go really slowly, you lose some of that kind of momentum and what, one of the
key things here that you really want to be thinking about is the relaxed movement
of the hand, so I found, when I was doing, like I could make the movements,
but my hand felt really, really stiff and it was just all kinds of horrible; just it
didn't feel nice to do. The biggest problem for me was using a too thicker
pick. Okay? If I was trying to use, like the, you know, the classic medium pick,
it's just too difficult for me when I was starting to do this pattern, at this
stage of your journey, so I found using the real paper-thin pick, soon as I went
to it, it was like, "Oh yeah! Yeah, we're good now. I can relax a lot more."
You can, kind of, hold the pick a little tighter than you probably should because,
ideally, you want to hold it really super relaxed but you can hold onto it in a kind
of a confident way, and then just let your whole arm relax as much as you can.
So, while you're practicing the pattern, once you've got it kind of automated,
and you're doing the pattern on its own, you want to then start thinking more
and more about trying to relax the whole arm so, you're really just; it's going
ONE, TWO-AND-three-AND-FOUR. It's like the down strums are, like,
your hand falling down, and then the upstrokes are just lifting it back up.
So, it's relaxed and a little lift, and relaxed and a little lift. You're really aiming
for that relaxed feeling. It'll help you play in time as well. Like I said, a lot
of beginners kind of rush too much, and part of that being really relaxed will
help you kind of sit on the beat nice and comfortably. Music is a form of
expression and when you feel relaxed when you play, people listening to you will
feel relaxed, and you'll feel more relaxed. It's like a little happy circle,
where you just getting, "Oh yeah, I'm in the groove now. It's nice and relaxed; it
feels good," and then everyone around feels good, and you feel good, you know?
Whereas if it's really tight and tense, and not really working, it kind of feels
like that, and it sounds like it. It is one of those things where it's easy for me
to say, "Yeah, just relax man", 'cause you rightly say like you can do it but I've
just done it with, in the left-handed thing, and I found it really difficult.
But the times when it was best was when I managed to relax, so I was struggling
with it as well, just felt awkward and tense and as soon as it relaxed, it just
was like the whole thing felt better so as soon as you're in that groove, as soon as
you're kind of, making the motion right, you can do the pattern consistently,
you wanna try and switch your concentration into just really trying to
keep it feeling good and keeping it as relaxed as you can. If you feel good with
it, try applying it to songs, if you don't feel good with it yet, keep it separate
and work on basic strumming patterns that you know already but as soon as you're
kind of like, "yeah, I'm cool with this pattern", start trying to incorporate it
into your song practice as well.