Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher

Category: Music

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Description: Mastering strumming and strumming patterns can be difficult if you don’t understand the fundamentals of the technique. Watch as Nick shows how to use the muscles in your hands, relax your wrist and master the technique. Find hundreds more lessons, videos and tutorials at the Secret Guitar Teacher site! Sign up now for a free 30 day trial secretguitarteacher.com -- Abridged Script There is an unbelievable amount of detail we could discuss about the subject of strumming and strumming patterns. But, the problems we experience with this element of guitar playing come from a lack of understanding of the fundamental mechanics of strumming. So, let’s begin with those. The first key to being able to strum quickly and smoothly is to relax your wrist. First, hold your hand out in front of you like this.. palm facing straight down and keep the hand as rigid as you can. You should be able to feel, and even see the arm muscles tensing up all the way to the elbow joint when you do this Next, let your hand drop – let go of all those muscles that were holding it rigid and just let it go… now shake it from side to side …gently to start with, making sure you keep the wrist itself as relaxed as possible. Then gradually increase the energy level – make it go faster and further from side to side. Then simply take that action, move your hand into position and strum with exactly the action as an experiment, see what happens if you tense the wrist up at all I think you’ll find that it immediately loses speed or rhythmic regularity – or both. So that is the first and most important mechanical element of good strumming action – keep the wrist relaxed. Once we have the hand moving, the next most important element is what I call resistance. In this case I am talking about the degree to which the strings are made to resist the passage of the fingers or plectrum. If playing without the plectrum, to maximise resistance, I place my thumb behind my finger, play at right angles to the direction of the strings and do my best to really dig in. To minimise resistance I switch to using the edge of my thumb, I play diagonally across the strings contacting them as lightly as possible – just skimming the surface. Similarly, when using the plectrum, to maximise resistance I make sure my thumb is firmly behind the pick … Similarly, when using the plectrum, to maximise resistance I make sure my thumb is firmly behind the pick … That of course produces a very harsh sound that I think you would rarely want to use. At the other end of the spectrum, we can play with almost no resistance. Here, I have the pick turned round so that I am using the rounded edge of it and again I am strumming diagonally across the strings rather than at right angles and my contact is as minimal as I can make it – thinking in terms of skimming the surface of the strings really lightly. Those are the main mechanics involved in strumming guitar, but the sound you produce is also shaped by how you use the fretting hand Simple muting technique puts me in charge of how long the sound of each strum lasts. We can make each strum ring by keeping the strings pressed firmly against the frets or we can cut the sound off by relaxing our grip and allowing the strings to come away from the frets like this. We can also add interesting effects by hammering-on the chord or pulling it off. Finally, for this lesson, back to the right hand. Where we can see how we can vary the sound enormously by simply selecting different sets of strings to hit. We can home in on the bass strings concentrate on the middle or just pick out the top end. A great way to practice the basic mechanics of strumming as shown in this lesson is to select one single chord and play it for about 20-30 minutes, experimenting to see how much variety of rhythm you can create just with these basics – maybe something like this, so restricting myself just to an E major chord.