A short YouTube lesson by Lauren Bateman teaching how to add dynamics and gentler strumming to acoustic guitar playing. Key points: loosen the strumming wrist (shake out the hand, breathe), use a lighter/thinner pick to reduce string attack while the wrist loosens, and practice a two-part exercise called "loud and soft" on a single chord (demonstrated with G). The exercise progresses from loud vs soft alternations to gradual crescendos and decrescendos, aiming to enable accented rhythms and finer dynamic control.
Questions this video answers
0.5 millimeters (red pick).
1.4 millimeters (heavy pick).
0.73 millimeters (medium, yellow pick).
0.6 millimeters (orange pick).
"Loud and soft" exercise, using a single chord (G) with down-up strums.
Chapters
Hey, guitar enthusiasts, I'm going to be answering a really important question, which is, Lauren, how do I get more gentle with my guitar strumming or how do I add dynamics into my acoustic guitar strumming? We're going to talk a little bit about that here in this lesson.
So first I'm going to give you some tips about playing with dynamics and how we can achieve that. And then I'm going to show you an exercise that I use for with my students, my beginner guitar students, to start practicing having a gentler strumming pattern so that we can add more dynamics and dynamic strumming techniques into our playing. So the first thing I want to talk about is the actual strumming itself, the strumming hand. So for a lot of guitar students, your strumming hand is so stiff, and what happens when you play, when you strum the guitar, it sounds like this.
Ouch, right? And you're like, okay, it sounds like crap. I don't know why your guitar sounds so good compared to my guitar. And that's usually the number one reason, is that this hand is so stiff. This hand really looks like a whip. If you watch my hand, I'm going to do some fast strumming right now. But just watch my hand, what it's doing. You're going to see it doing this. It's like a whip.
See it? I'm not going. I don't have this tight wrist, so things will relax as you do more and more strumming. But just shake out that hand before you start strumming. Don't forget to breathe. Keep it loose, okay? That will gentle up your strumming all in itself. But if you're finding that you're having difficulty doing that, what you might want to do to counteract a little bit for this stiff wrist is to use a less stiff pick. So I. I'm a big fan of the Dunlop Tortex picks. We'll throw some pictures up here for you guys, but they range anywhere. The lightest one I have is 0.5 millimeters, which is the red one. And the thickest one I have is 1.4 millimeters. This is what we call a heavy pick. Now, I wouldn't play my guitar with a heavy pick.
Because one, it's more likely that the pick is going to fall out of your hand and drop on the floor. But. But also, the pick doesn't have a lot of give to it. It's very stiff. So if you're adding a stiff pick and a stiff wrist together, you're going to get.
Stiff strumming, okay? So let's focus not on using the heavy picks. What I recommend is going to a lighter pick. So this is the red and the orange. The red is 0.5 millimeters, the orange is 0.6 millimeters. There's a lot more flexibility. Watch. I see how flexible this pick is. I can bend it. Okay. The other one I can't even bend. So even if you dig into this.
See how you don't hear the strings snapping? I'm gonna do the same pressure with the really thick pick. Just listen.
You can hear the string snapping versus this really, really light pick.
So see, even though my wrist is stiff, the pick is very flexible. So it's taking a little bit of the attack off your hand. So if you're just getting started with guitar and your strumming is sounding very, very achy and harsh, try going to a lighter pick. That will help until your wrist loosens up. So those are my two tips for helping you with getting gentler strumming on the guitar with. What I want to talk about now is an exercise I do with my students to work on some of this dynamic playing. Hey, guitar enthusiasts, hope you're enjoying this so far. Real quick, if you haven't subscribed to the channel, make sure to do so and turn on the notifications. This way. YouTube will let you know when I release more videos just like this one. So in my hand right now, I actually have a medium sized pick. This is a 0.73 millimeter. It's the yellow pick. And we're going to work on an exercise I like to call loud and soft. So we're going to take a chord, whichever one you want. I'm going to play a G chord, okay? You play your G chord however you want. If you use a pinky on the bottom, the third finger on the bottom, okay. If you use my easy G chord, whatever you want, just pick a G chord and we're going to stick with that. So all I want you to do is I want you to strum and we're going to just do it down, up, okay?
And what I want you to do is I want you to dig in a little bit more to loud, okay? So it's gonna go sound like this.
You're gonna hear that snapping of the strings. And then what I want you to do, I want you to come down from that high point to play your guitar as softly as you can. So let's try that right now. Play your guitar as softly as you can.
Probably barely hear it on my microphone. But in order to do this, in order to play gentle on the guitar and play soft with your strumming and get more dynamics, you gotta loosen the grip on the pick and that will start loosening up your wrist. So let's try that again. Play soft as you can.
My pick is barely gracing those strings.
Okay, let's go loud again. Dig in.
Just down, up. Dig in.
Hey, relax.
Did you feel the tension in your wrists? Relax. Let me know in the comments below if you felt the tension in your wrists. Relax when we did that. Okay, let's go back to loud. Dig in really loud. Here we go. Loud as you can.
Soft again. Soft. Relax.
Let's try it one more time. Really loud.
Soft dynamics.
Can you feel that? Let me know in the comments below if you felt that. Did you feel your forearm relax when we went from really loud to soft? Okay. Did you feel your whole body relax? And don't forget to breathe. Right? Okay, so that's the first step in this exercise. The second step is, can we create a crescendo, a gradient upwards and downwards? We call that crescendo and decrescendo in music. Going from soft to loud. Crescendo. Going from loud to soft. Decrescendo. Okay, just a couple music terms. So let's try that. We're going to start very soft and we're going to get a little louder. A little louder, A little louder. And then we're going to be super loud and then we're going to bring it back down. Okay, try this with me. In the beginning, you may have one level of loud. Okay? But as you practice this exercise, I'm hoping we're going to build some dynamics and you're going to have different levels allowed, because when you can do that, you can do cool things like accented rhythms. That's a little bit more late beginner, early intermediate. But I'll put a link up here to a strumming video where I talk about throwing accents into your strumming and cool strumming patterns. But you have to master this first. Okay? So let's start really soft.
Nice and relaxed. A little louder. A little more pressure.
A little more pressure.
A little more pressure. Ready?
Hey, dig in now. Loud as you can.
All right, back it off a little bit.
Back it off again.
One more time. Back it off.
Now. As light as you can.
Is that cool? So that's what you want to do. You want to practice this gradient of going up and down, because this is how you're going to learn how to get that gentle strumming into your guitar. Okay. You want to learn about, you know, dynamic techniques for the acoustic guitar. This is where it starts. You have to be able to develop the wrist to know the difference of how it can play soft versus how it can play loud. So test out these two exercises, and hopefully it will help you build your dynamics on your acoustic guitar. If you guys enjoyed this video, make sure give me a thumbs up. YouTube's gonna pop a couple more videos up over here. Go check those out. And I do have a whole course on strumming and learning to play the guitar. So if you're looking to learn to play the guitar in a step by step manner, go check out the seven level guitar system. I'll put a link in the descript below.
