A short instructional transcript by Lauren Bateman (LB Music Schools) teaching basic guitar strumming patterns for beginners: whole-note, half-note, quarter-note strums, and a 3-strum-with-pause variant. Demonstrates holding open strings or simple chords (E minor, G), explains counting measures in 4/4, and recommends practicing chord changes to 100 BPM with a metronome before advancing.
Questions this video answers
100 beats per minute (100 BPM)
Chapters
Hi, my name is Lauren Bateman and I'm the owner here at LB Music Schools. And I wanted to check in and follow up on our rhythm review that we did about the quarter notes, half notes and whole notes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you two, maybe a little more strums that you can use for beginner songs. So at this point, if you're talking about strumming, if you haven't learned any chords or anything yet, you can just play the guitar open, meaning not fretting any notes with your, with your fretting hand, and that's okay. It might not sound the best, but if you can do that, awesome. If you know an E minor chord, which is a two fingered chord, we can use that for this as well. So what we're going to do is talk about whole note, half note and quarter note strumming. So quarter note strumming is usually the easiest way to start off in the beginning because students can't change their chords that quickly. So what we're going to do is I'm going to use an E minor chord. I'm not going to change any chords on you. I might, maybe I'll pop a G chord in. But first we're going to talk about strumming. So we talked about measures. Measures are sections of music. And at least for the simple talks we've been discussing, we've been counting to the number four. Each measure has four counts. So if I were going to use a whole, whole note strumming pattern to play a song, it would sound something like this.
So I'm strumming once and I'm letting the chord ring for four measures. So if I add a G chord in here and I use the strumming again and I hold each chord for one whole note, it would be 1, 2, 3, 4.
1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4 dot so that.
Is our whole note strumming. So now if we wanted to get into half note strums, so say your chords are starting to get a little bit quicker, you think you can go a little bit faster? Well, we're just gonna play half notes instead of whole notes. So that would sound something like this. If I just use an E minor chord to start.
1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four.
If I decided to throw in a chord change, I'm gonna use a G chord here.
I would go 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4.
So each str is going to get, or, sorry, each chord is going to get two strums. Now, the hardest one, not because it's hard, it just depends on how fast you can change your chords. So as you get quicker, you might be able to throw four strums in per chord for each measure. So that would be our quarter notes, and that would sound like this.
1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. 1, 2, 3, Four.
Now, if I were going to throw in a chord change back to that G chord, it would sound like this.
Now, if you find that doing four strums per chord is too much, if four quarter notes is too much, you can always just do three and then pause and give yourself time to change chords. What do I mean? Well, let me show you. So for this next strumming pattern, if you're not quite fast enough to do the four strums per measure, what you can do is do three strums per measure and give yourself one count to change chords. So if I were going to start.
With E minor, it would be 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4 dot I think.
I gave you an extra strum on that last E minor, but in general, that's what you're doing. So you would just strum three times.
One, two, three.
And when you say four, you don't strum. You actually use that to give you enough time to switch to the next chord. So those are the strumming basics for guitar. I usually stick with these strums with my students for quite some time until they can get their chord changes up. My recommendation is to get your chord changes to 100 beats per minute. That means you can change between one chord to the next a hundred times on a. On a metronome. So you would set your metronome to 100 beats, 100 bpm. It's kind of like miles per hour in a car. You would set that to a BPM of 100 and it would click and it would be like, click, click, click.
And you would practice with that metronome. And until you get to that point, I wouldn't advance your strumming any more than that. So that is your basics of counting and strumming with the guitar for beginner songs.
