Lauren Bateman fixes the pause between chord changes by keeping your strumming hand moving while your fretting hand builds the next chord, or by dropping the final strum to buy time. Smooth timing matters more than hitting every note.
When you're playing along to songs, do they sound like this?
If you're a guitar player that suffers from pause syndrome, those little stops that come in between the chord changes when you're playing a song, then you're definitely going to want to watch this video because I'm going to show you how to iron that out step by step with just a couple little tweaks and tips. Let's get started.
So oftentimes when I work with students, they're so excited to get into the really intricate and advanced strumming patterns, but their chord changes haven't quite caught up to their strumming hand. So they have these pauses in the music and it kind of sounds choppy. And I always tell them, well, you know what we can do? There's a little secret I can show you that will actually smooth that out. So I'm going to show you a couple examples of here of some strumming patterns that I teach my beginner students and what we can do to smooth things out when the chord changes fast enough. So there's a couple things that I tell students to do. Let's take a simple strumming pattern, okay? Let's just take a four down strumming pattern, which I use for a lot of beginners. There's two things that I tell students to do, and I'm going to show you this example and I'll show you another example in a second. And what we're going to do is we're going to just play an E minor chord, okay? We're going to do E minor to a G chord, okay? Whichever one you feel comfortable with, whether you use your pinky, your third finger, whether you use the double fingers, it doesn't matter to me. It's all about the strumming is really what's important right now. So we're going to do an E minor chord for four strums and a G chord for four strums, okay? E minor.
For some of you, this may be fine, but I just want to show you a simplified example before I show you the one that most people have trouble with. And for absolute beginners, that might be too much. They get to the G chord and they go.
And they stop and then they try and make the G chord, but there's this giant pause in between. So step number one is to not stop your strumming hand. No matter what you do, do not stop the strumming hand, okay? So if you're on an E minor.
All right, if you have to go very slowly, you might sacrifice that first down strum and it's all open strings. Okay. It might sound like this. And by the time you get to the second strum, maybe you have the chord. That's okay. That sounds better than pausing in between the chords. So that's step one is make sure your strumming hand never stops. Watch my fretting hand, what I'm doing here. So we're going to do E minor.
Okay. So you can see what I'm doing. I'm building the chord because in the beginning for a lot of students, they have to build those chord changes like one finger at a time. Eventually they'll start hitting a lot more simultaneously. But in the beginning, that's how most beginners start. You have to build the chord one finger at a time. So that's step number one is make sure you just keep the strumming hand moving and make the fretting hand catch up. So that's option one. Option number two is to drop the last strum of the strumming pattern. This way you give yourself some more time to get to the next chord. What do I mean? So if we had E minor, 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3.
Because for some people, that coordination, some people aren't as coordinated. So keeping strumming while trying to change the chord really throws them for a brain loop. So for some people, it is easier to just stop the strumming. So in this case, I'm strumming three, one, two, three. I'm sacrificing the fourth down strum to give myself enough time to get to the G so that when one comes around, I can strum that G chord so it sound like this.
So see how the timing is smoothed out? So instead of sounding like.
Instead of having those dead spaces in between the chords, we're actually fixing the timing. Even though we're missing a strum. It sounds so much better because the timing is smooth. And. And as a student, I want you to understand, especially if you're a beginner, that smooth timing is way more important and will make you sound like a better guitar player versus getting all the strums in and having it sound choppy like that. So let's take another example and this, this is a little bit more for. For late beginner people who are, you know, their chord changes are coming along and they're able to develop their strumming patterns a bit more. Maybe they're throwing in some up strums. This happens very often. You know, you get to that. You're doing that four down strums, and you're like, great. This is awesome. I can do four down strums all day, no problem. Then you go to a strumming pattern like 1, 2, and 3 and 4. And.
Again, it's not as pronounced, but there's. There's that little hesitation. There's just that little pause, and it throws the timing off just a little bit. So on an example like this, again, I would just recommend dropping that last strum. In this case, it's not a down strum anymore, it's an up strum. But dropping that eighth note may give you enough time to get over to that next chord.
I hope you guys found these strumming and timing tips very helpful. But if you're looking for ways to get those chord changes moving faster, maybe that's really what's holding you guys back. Check out this video over here where I'm going to show you a few different ways and tips and techniques that I use with my students to help them get those fingers moving faster. Go click on that video and I'll see you in the lesson.
