7 COOL STRUMMING PATTERNS from 1 Rhythm - How to Make Your Strumming Patterns Sound Better

Hey, guitar enthusiast, Lauren Bateman here. And in this lesson video we're going to go over ways to make your strumming sound so much cooler, even if you're just a beginner.

Now I get asked the question all the time, Lauren, how do I make my strumming sound cooler? I feel like I'm playing the same thing over and over again. And when you strum, you always sound so much better than I do. So like, what can I do to sound more like you versus like nails on a chalkboard? So that's what I'm going to go over. In this lesson video, I'm going to give you some tips on how we can make your strumming sound a little bit better. I'm going to give you some strumming examples. So let's get started. Now, if you're looking for some more technique type stuff, I do have another video I posted on getting into technique of how to make your strum sound cooler. But these are actually strumming patterns. But I will give you one tip from that video which is relaxing your strumming hand. Okay. A lot of people, this sometimes is like the number one way to just make your strum sound better. Because a lot of people, I'm just going to put up a very simple strumming pattern up here. It's an eighth note strumming pattern. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. Okay. And most people, they'll play that strumming pattern like this.

Now when you're a beginner, I mean that's how it sounds. It sounds pretty horrible because your hand is so stiff and there's no flexibility in your wrist. So I tell people, relax the wrist and glide over the strings. See how much better it already sounds. I'm just relaxing my wrist and letting the pick glide along the strings. Alright, so that's step number one. Try and relax your wrist instead of. Because if you dig in, you're gonna pop the strings. And if you find that really hard, I tell students, go from a thicker pick to maybe a lighter pick and it will take some of the edge off. But that's tip number one. Just relaxing the strumming hand already makes my guitar sound way better. So a lot of being a good strummer is relax. So keep that in mind. So we're going to stick with this strumming pattern, this eighth note strumming pattern. And I'm going to show you how to take almost pretty much the same exact strumming pattern and make it sound different in cool ways. So let's get into that. So often the thing that separates beginner guitar players for more intermediate and advanced guitar players is the use of dynamics. How loud and how soft we play something in music. We call this an accent, and it looks like a little carrot. So you'll see me putting some of those above the rhythms over there. And an accent just means play this part louder and then play the other stuff a little bit softer. So if I take that first strumming pattern. All right, we'll just use a G chord. We'll use a simple G chord for this. And I'm going to play that first strumming pattern with the relaxed pick. Right.

So it's just 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and down, up, down, up, down, up,. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.

And that's what most people do. And they do that for the entire song. And, you know, after you go through a couple chord progressions, it starts sounding pretty boring. So what I'm going to have you do is I'm going to introduce a couple accents on this rhythm to spice it up. So I want what I'm going to do. You'll see up here, I'm going to put that little carrot, that little accent, above the second beat and above the fourth beat. Now, why would we do that? Because whenever you listen to music, if you have a drummer playing in the background, the snare drum is usually on the two and the four. So it adds a little bit of a percussive element to your rhythm playing. So I'm going to take that same strumming pattern. I'm going to play it through twice without the accents, and then I'm going to add the accents in so that you guys can hear the difference. Ready? So here it is without the accents.

One and two and three and four and one and two.

Ready? Accent four.

And one and two and three and four. And one and two and 3 and 4.

Already sounds much cooler, right? Very. I mean, all we did was just add a little loudness to our strumming, and it made it sound completely different. Now, if I played a little bit faster, it'll sound like this.

So can you hear that? 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. It gives a little bit of a drive to your strumming pattern. So now we've taken this really boring.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and.

4And 1 and 2 and 3 and.

4, 1 and keep and chicken.

You just feel like you can groove with it so much more and it adds so much and it's the same exact strumming pattern. All we did was just add a couple accents. So this is a really good example of how you can take the same strumming pattern, add a little dynamics to it and make it sound so much cooler. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the video so far. We're going to do a lot more examples here. Real quick. If you haven't subscribed to my channel, make sure to do so. Turn those notifications on so that you know when I release more videos just like this one. Let's get into the next example. Now I'm going to take that same exact strumming pattern that I just did in the last one. I'm going to show you something that I call the karate chop. Alright, so we're still going to be accenting 2 and 4. Same exact strumming pattern. Alright, so this is what it sounds like without the karate chop. And then I'm going to play the karate chop. So it's going to be 1 and.

2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and.

Ready?

1 and 2.

Oh, now you're really using your guitar as a drum. It's super cool. I think I have a tutorial. There's a lots of songs do. This is a very, very common strumming pattern. What was the song? Maggie May, Rod Stewart Maggie May I. I actually do this in that tutorial. But what it is is I'm literally karate chopping my guitar. I'm hitting it pretty much with the pinky and the palm side of my hand. And you're not going to break your guitar. Like you can really whack it. Don't go soft, but my hand is so loose that my pinky whacks off the body of my guitar. And I'm an acoustic guitar. So you can't really do this unless you have a hollow body guitar because the hollowness creates a drum. So now we've gone from the first drumming pattern of 1 and 2 and.

3 and 4 and 1 and 2.

To the accent inversion 1 and 2.

And 3 and 4, 1 and 2.

And now the karate chop version. Ready?

1 and 2 and 3 and 1 and 2 and 3 and.

So there you go. You just did three different strumming patterns with the same rhythm. What does that tell you? There's only so much rhythm we can do on an instrument, you know, and usually there's ones that you do use over and over. But adding in some of these dynamics can really open up your playing. All right. And make you sound a little bit more professional. These are really the things that, like I said, separate the beginners for from kind of like the more intermediate style players. So those are just three examples with that same strumming pattern. I'm going to show you another strumming pattern now where we're just accenting on the third beat. Okay. It's going to sound very different than what we were doing before. And here it is. Ready?

1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and4. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

So you're saying, Lauren, that really doesn't sound like much, but let's put a chord progression behind this. Let's play G, E minor, C, D, and see what it sounds like. So we've got one, two, three, four.

One and two and three and four. And one and two and three and four. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. 1 and 2 and 3 and four. And 1 and 2 and 3.

Hear that?

Very different from the first one we were doing. So here was the first one.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3.

And now second one.

1 and 2 and 3, and 4. And 1 and 2, 3 and 4. Very different.

Very different feel again, same exact strumming pattern. We just changed where we put the accent. All right, so that's another example of one of these accented and dynamic rhythms that you can work on. So I'm going to show you another accented rhythm, But I want to touch upon something that can really make a big difference in your strumming and sounding like a beginner and sounding really good. So a lot of times when we're strumming, we don't always catch every single string every single time. When we're doing down strums, we would probably catch most of the strings. But the up strums, we don't. If you strum all the strings, don't do that. Okay. Or if you are. No, you don't strum all the strings on the up strum, strum. But what if on the down strums, we didn't strum all the strings either? What if we kept our strumming to the bottom three or four strings? All right. And what I'm going to do, we're going to accent the first beat. So we're going to accent the one and keep everything else very small. All right, so here we go. It's going to be 1 and 2.

And 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and4.

Sounds not like much over just a G chord. Let's put it behind that chord progression again. All right, G, E minor, C, D. Here we go. 1, 2, 3, 4.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and four and one.

And.

So you can hear by only hitting these lower strings, the bass note of that chord is ringing out much longer. You can hear it. It's just gon ringing. So it gives a little, really good little accent on that first beat.

Very different from the third beat.

So here's 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and four. And 1 and 2 and 3, and 4.

I almost feel like I like the third beat accent better than the first beat, but I wanted to give you another example to talk about that. Hey, guys, I hope you enjoyed this video. Don't forget to give me a thumbs up as it helps show my YouTube videos to more students just like you. Now, this concept we just talked about works very well on chords that run over two measures. Okay, so a lot of times in songs, you'll have chords where they're four beats. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. And every. Just like in all the examples I've shown you, we change the chord every four beats. Well, sometimes you're going to get songs that have chords for two measures. So you would play like a G chord. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. Okay, so what you can do is you can just accent the one on the first measure and then keep the rest of the measure very condensed. With that little strumming, it'll sound like this. Ready? One, two, three, four.

One and two and three and four. And one and two and three and four. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. One and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and four. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 dot And 1 and 2 and 3 and4.

And in that example, I think that's where accenting on the first beat really, really stands out and makes the song sound really cool. It actually opens the song up a lot versus just.

Right. Instead of just doing that, now we're doing.

Much better. Right?

Very, very different feel. So play around with that. You don't have to strum every single string every Single time. That's not how strumming works. And the very last thing that I want to touch upon, and I think this is very important, is crescendos. Okay, now what is a crescendo in music? That's when we go from something very small to very loud. So we go soft to loud. And I think crescendos are very great ways to either go from a verse into a chorus or come out of a chorus into a verse. All right. Usually it's. You're building from something light and fluffy to something energetic. Okay, so how would I use that? Let's go back to my chord progression with the G E minor cd. Okay, so it's going to be. I'll use that. That one I just used, actually. Okay. With the accent on the one. And what I'm going to do when I get to this D chord at the end. Listen, the first measure, I'm going to play the accented one, but I'm going to crescendo on the second measure. Lauren, this sounds weird. Let me show you. Ready? Here it is.

We got 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and four. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 dot and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1.

Here comes. Ready? Here's the accent.

One and two and three and four and one.

Ah.

So what did I do? I switched from down up strumming to all downs. So I accented 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And when I got to that second measure, I went all down, still eighth notes, but all down. So I went. Started slow. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And so I went from strumming very few strings. This also helps make it sound bigger. Very few strings to all of a sudden strumming all the strings.

So 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

So you see how that build. It's called a crochet crescendo and music. And it's a great way to add a lot of emotion to your strumming and playing, particularly when you might be going from a very even kilted verse into a very, very energetic chorus. So those are just a few examples of ways to make your guitar strumming more expressive. I do a lot of this in my guitar strumming course. I'll put a link in the description below. And of course, I'll give you guys a special discount for being YouTube viewers. But. But what I do with students when we learn rhythm is we just learn as many strumming patterns as possible because rhythm is very fluid. And eventually what we want to happen to this strumming hand is we want it to go on automatic pilot. Usually when you learn a song or you play music, you don't usually use the same strumming pattern for the entire song. There is a lot of improvisation that happens, but you don't really get there to that point until you start feeling the music. So if you're. If you're focused on the strumming pattern has to be this for the entire song or it's wrong. That's not right. Listen to your favorite artists. They do a lot of improvisation in their rhythm. Especially when they're strumming a lot or very, very fast, there's a lot of changes that happen. So don't focus on whether the rhythm is right and wrong. It's better to be in time than to be playing the same rhythm strictly every time. So experiment a bit with some of these. Throw them into some of your favorite songs. The more you experiment, the more fluid your rhythm will become. And that's what rhythm and timing is all about. So I hope you guys get to that automatic pilot very, very soon. If you're interested in checking out that course again, I'll put a link in the description below for you guys to go check that out. YouTube's gonna pop over a few more videos over here. Make sure to go and check those out. There might be something else there that interests you, and I hope to see you guys in another lesson video.