Get Started Adding Drumming To Your Strumming

In this second lesson, we are introducing chords, a percussive beat and then playing them together.

The chords and techniques we are using are:

• A G major and C add 9 chord

• The kick and snare beat on the end/side of the guitar

Exercise 1 -

• Strum through the G chord and move arm towards the end of the guitar position

• Turn your wrist (downstroke motion) to play the kick sound on the guitar belly with your thumb

• We use the wrist to turn the opposite way (upstroke motion) and let the fingers to tap the guitar side for the snare sound

• Now, the motion is going back toward the sound hole to start over again

• Twice round, that concludes the first bar of the exercise piece

Repeat the same sequence with the C add 9 chord.

Exercise 2 - Continuing to bars 3 and 4, we introduce an upstroke on the chord at the end of the sequence.

Exactly as performed in exercise 1,

• Strum through the G chord

• Play the kick drum

• Play the snare drum, and begin to move back towards the sound hole

• Finally, play an upstroke of the chord before starting again on the downstroke

Complete this motion twice for Bar 3 and as we approach bar 4, we move to the C add 9 chord doing exactly the same motions in exercise 2.

Exercise 3 - The variation for this exercise is simply swapping our last motion (the upstroke chord) for a kick drum sound (belly of guitar) just before starting over on beat 1.

Similarly to Exercise 2 -

• Strum through the G chord

• Play the kick drum

• Play the snare drum

• Tap the belly of the guitar again for the kick drum and start moving the arm back to the sound hole

Twists in the wrist are key here, so we can play kicks and snares smoothly and in time.