BEST Guitar Strumming Patterns for BEGINNERS

Hey, guitar enthusiasts. I get asked all the time, Lauren, what are the best drumming patterns for beginners to use when they first start learning to play guitar? So I'm going to show you the patterns that I show my students, but not only that, I'm going to show you how we can work on your timing, which is one of the most important parts of being a good guitar player.

So before I show you some strumming patterns that I would show my beginner students, I. I am going to show you three different types of notes that we're going to be using in these rhythms. And it's very important to understand these because they're the foundation for most of the rhythm patterns you're going to learn on your guitar. So the first note I want you to be aware of is a circle. It looks like a donut. We call this a whole note in music. And what that means is it's four beats. Now, what is a B? It's what you tap your foot to. But it's just a time relation. So think of it in terms of seconds. A lot of people understand that. So think of a whole note as four seconds. Now, it could be more than four seconds or shorter, but for simplicity's sake, just think of it as four clicks on a clock.

1, 2, 3, 4.

All right, so if we were to play a chord, let's take an E minor chord, since that's an easy one for most students to play. Okay. I like to do mine with my first and second fingers, but if you do yours with your second and third, it's perfectly acceptable, too. And if we use this whole note pattern, this is the first strumming pattern that I teach beginner students, because usually in the beginning, your chord changes aren't very fast, right? So you have to build up the speed on your chord changes. So we start with what we call this is whole note strumming. It's the first strumming pattern I show all students. And we just strum the guitar, and we count to four.

So we go, 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4 dot okay, so.

That'S a whole not strumming pattern. And what it does say you're changing into a chord like a C chord, it gives you enough time to strum.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four, four.

One gives you enough time to get between the chords. The other reason I do this for students is because we start working on timing right away. You strum on one.

1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. 1, 2, 3, Four. 1, 2, 3,4.

I always tell students it's better to play less strumming in the beginning and stay in time with the music than do a really complicated strumming pattern and have a bunch of pauses. For example, something like this.

Now, if you feel like that's how your playing sounds right now, my recommendation would be to either take this first strumming pattern or one of the ones I'm going to show you in a second here and simplify the strumming so that you give your hands enough time to change the next chord. All right, so that was symbol number one. Symbol number two is going to be the quarter note, okay? So think of it like a dollar if you're in the US And a dollar bill has four quarters. Or you can think of it as a pie, right? If you cut a pie in fourths, you would have four pieces, right? So these are going to be counted.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Do you notice it's the same as the whole note? Okay, that's great. Because a whole note, you strum once and you hold for four counts with a quarter note, we are going to strum four for every single quarter.

So it'll be 1, 2, 3, 4.

Okay, again.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Very simple. But again, we're working on timing, so.

We would do 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4 dot now, you.

Might say, oh, you know, Lauren, myself, C chord is. It's just still not quite up to speed yet on that fourth down strum. I feel like I'm rushing to get to the next chord.

What you can do is you can.

Put in what we call a rest where you don't strum on that fourth beat.

You just go, 1, 2, 3. And then it gives you that extra.

Quarter note to change the chord. Okay? So that's perfectly acceptable. Again, it's much better to stay in time with a song than have big pauses. So if you're. Again, if you're going.

I would rather you go.

Get rid of that one strum just to give you a little extra time to get to that next chord. So there you go. Those are two more strumming options for absolute beginners as you're building up your chord change speed. Now, eventually students say, laurent, you know, I've been doing the whole note strumming. I've been doing the quarter note strumming, and it doesn't sound that exciting. When do I start getting do up strums on guitar? So up strums require us to Understand what an eighth note is. That's our third rhythm notation. I guess we learned four because you learned what a quarter note rest was. But this is our third one. It's called the eighth note. Okay? So if we took our pie that was in four pieces, and we cut those four pieces in half again, we'd have eight. Eight slices of pie. And that's what happens in music. When you take a quarter note and you split it in half, you get two eighth notes or eight notes over an entire measure. And those are counted one and two and three and four. And now what I do for students, because everyone's usually pretty good at down strums, they might have to work on their timing a little bit. But all of a sudden, everyone gets to doing up strums, and, like, they feel like their hand is spasming. It's because there's probably a lot of muscle tension. You do have to relax when you're strumming, and this comes into play more on the up strums versus the down strums. But I just want to let you guys know and on a little secret here, okay? When we go back to our quarter note strumming, watch my strumming hand. Watch what happens.

Right? Even though I'm only strumming the downs, what happens to my hand? It has to come back up, right? You've already been doing up strums. You just haven't been hitting the strings on the way up. And for some reason, that's a big disconnect for, like, the muscles. Most people, when they start doing up strums, it sounds like this, you know, and they're in there grabbing the strings. And oftentimes students ask me, you know, when they're doing the up strums.

Those bottom strings sound very tinny and rough. You may want to go to. To a thinner pick. All right. A lot of times, students, this. This pick I'm using here is a medium pick. All right? I think it's this one's like 0.73. I would recommend going to maybe a 0.5 millimeter or even a 0.6 millimeter, something with a little bit more flexibility. It'll take a little bit of that curse out on these upstroms for you. So when we're doing this next pattern, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to throw in one up strum. I start students with one upstrom and just getting it, building it into the mechanics of the rhythms that we've already learned. But this strumming pattern will work for a lot of songs. So it's going to start like this. We'll go back to that E minor chord and it's just going to be.

1, 2, 3 and 4.

That's it. Just one strum, one up strum between 3 and 4.

1, 2, 3 and 4.

Okay.

Play down, down, down.

Okay. So that gives you an opportunity to work on one up strum. Also, you notice I didn't put an up strum after the four because if we have an up strum after the four, it means your chord changes need to be even faster than they are. The more strumming you do, the faster your chord changes need to be. So that's something to keep in mind when you're a beginner and you're trying to do strumming is you have to match your. You're strumming to the level you're at. And that's what I do in my seven level guitar system. The course, my beginner course. And we build on things just like this. One layer at a time, one step at a time that you know, you start at the very beginner levels and then we build up. And eventually once, once your chord changes become fast enough, you could add in two up strums. And this is a very, very popular beginner guitar strumming pattern that works for a lot of songs. Actually, if you see, if you watch a lot of my beginner songs, you'll see I use this pattern quite frequently because it sounds really nice and it works well for a lot of songs. So that would be adding two up strums. So the last one, once you get that down, just a single up strum. Now we're going to add two up strums. Let's go back to that E minor chord. This one's going to be 1, 2, 3 and 4. And 1, 2, 3, 3 and 4. And play down, down, down, up, down, up.

So we got 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Now that you've learned some fun beginner strumming patterns, I highly recommend you, you go check out my beginner song playlist over there where you can start applying some of these patterns to fun songs. I'll see you guys over in that playlist.