Strumming On The Beat

Hi guys, I'm glad you're here to join me for the first strumming pattern that we're going to learn. If this is your first strumming pattern ever, this is the ideal place for you to start if you're an absolute beginner. But also if you've been playing a number of years, you may wish to check out this lesson to really help you understand the core reason. We're going for the other strumming patterns from here and if you want to fast track, start from this lesson and then go down the columns on the sheet as I explained in the opening video. So strumming pattern number one goes as follows. I'm gonna be demonstrating this strumming pattern on an E-chord in accordance with the beginner's course. So for that strumming pattern, I was playing 4 times on each beat for 4 bars. Now let me just explain that terminology for those that aren't sure what bars and beats are. The beat is the pulse behind the music. It's the thing that you nod your head to, that you would tap your foot to, and that kind of everything in the song can line up to, but it's a pulse running through the song that something doesn't. Necessarily need to be playing on it for it to still be there, it can still be felt even when nothing's playing. We'll talk about that more uh in later lessons when we're missing out strums. But, um, rather than us counting every beat in the song, we count them in a loop of 41234. So 4 even pulses or 4 evenly spaced to account. Um, which we call a bar. So the absolute simplest strumming pattern you could do is just strumming on beat one, which is something called a spread because it spreads out for the entire bar. 2341234. And when we do spreads, these are great to start a song, but we just want to do it strummed slightly slower and really hear the pick down every string. Kind of like a harp. 234. 234. Again I'm demoing on that E major chord. But when we're playing a real song, a great place to start, even if you're at a higher level and you've gone for some trickier strumming patterns before, is working out how the song goes by strumming on every beat. Even if I take quite a complex song with a guitar riff to it, so Back in Black by AC DC for example, that song can just be strummed on the beat and it still kind of sounds like that song when someone's strumming along. So if I go Back in Black, I hit the sack. It's been so long, I'm glad to be back, you sound let loose. It still sounds like that song, or reminiscent of it when you're strumming. It would just sound more like that song if we did some higher level strumming hand, but everything with this hand would be the same if we increased the strumming complexity. So we've. We've Got to make sure the chord hand and everything is working in sync with a simple strumming pattern and then we make this hand more complex. That's how I've taught all you guys to play any of the songs that are already uploaded to my YouTube channel. And that's where we're gonna start today. We're just gonna start on the Echord and we're gonna strum a bar for down strums on the beat. This works really great if you can tap your the the foot with the leg that you're not your guitar isn't on. So for me it would be my left leg because I'm strumming right-handed. So 123, for example, my hand will go with my foot, that's a really good tip. But it's not gonna be where the focus of this course lies. We're just gonna try and get you strumming as quickly as possible. So just to demo again, we're gonna go for one bar and then the goal is to be able to do each strumming pattern 4 times so that you've really grasped how it looped at least 4 times really. So to demo first of all. That's 4 even strums to a medium slow tempo. A lot of these should be learned fairly slow, but if you do the strumming patterns too slow, it can be harder because you haven't got momentum working in your favour. So fairly up tempo, don't be afraid to to go for it, but keep everything even. Let's have a go at that just for one bar. In 12341. Stop there. That's just one bar of E. and you can see it's over so quickly. One bar isn't a long time, so we want to loop this. Let's just do that one more time just to make sure that we can do it. 2341. And stop and we can stop by laying the outside of your hand on all the strings. You don't need to hit your guitar. Just stop your strings ringing out to silence guitar. Let's try that for 2 bars now so that we know how this strumming pattern loops. In 1232 bars, 1. 3, and again, 1234, and silence your guitar. So that's how 2 bars of strumming on the beat. It's played and this is how it's written, so we have one bar to start off with, um, the bars are the vertical lines going down, and wherever that E happens, if there's only one chord per bar, it can be written anywhere, but I'll normally write them to this side of the bar to show that it is from the start. And two bars, you can see has the same written again. So we have one bar of E and another bar of E. A double line can indicate that this strumming pattern should repeat, which is what we're gonna be going for at the end of this video. But to start off, we're just gonna try and do it 4 times as the end part of this first lesson of strumming on the beat. So let's have a go at repeating this strumming pattern for 4 times and then stopping just with the one E chord. In 12341. Second bar. And stop there. That is our 4 bars of E and that means that you definitely know how to do this strumming pattern. Now the challenge doesn't end there, but the focus of this course is going to be on the strumming patterns themselves. What you want to aim to do now, like my beginner's course shows you, is how to change between two chords and then try and change between those two chords while doing a strumming pattern. For example, do a bar of E and a bar of A. To this strumming pattern, which will be level 1 of that beginner's course. So if you can strum E, 2, 4, then A, 234. And then do that in a loop, you've accomplished level one of the beginner's course and that is a real song that is for what it's worth by Buffalo Springfield. So that we can just work more on the strumming hand, we're not gonna be doing that in these series of videos, but that will be all on the beginner's course for free at Andyguitar.co.uk and I'll be letting you know which level the strumming pattern that we're going for is at as we go through each video. As I say. This strumming pattern is best done with the chords E and A. And you wanna try out for what it's worth, by Buffalo Springfield and go for that song to make sure that you know how to do it with those easy chords and go from there. So now you've got your first strumming pattern where every song you ever learn will start. Let's start to make our way through the trickier ones, but the ones that are really gonna showcase your newfound strumming ability. And let's get on to strumming pattern 2, which is 8th all down strumming.