How To Improve Up Strums On Guitar - Tips To Improve Rhythm and Timing

Hey, everybody, Lauren Bateman here. I wanted to talk a little bit about rhythm and timing. I get a lot of people who ask me questions. My rhythm's off. What do I do about that? And I think the best way to do is to start simplified. So in this video, what we're going to do is I'm going to talk about simple strumming pattern, which you might have seen from my beginner strumming course or my beginner strumming video on YouTube. And I'll put a link here if you guys want to check that out. But basically, we're going to talk about how you can build off of that to incorporate your up strums.

We got to talk about timing. So let's first get our timing on the downbeats, because most people are usually really, really good at downbeats, but they have trouble with the upbeats. They tend to rush them. And my big thing is to go slow. So first, let's start with our basic rhythm. Just do an E minor chord. And all we're going to do is four downs to start. So we've got one, two, three, four. Again. One, two, three, four. That's all you have to do. One more time. 1, 2, 3, 4. Perfect. And most people seem to be able to do that. And what happens is we go and then try and add up strums into our strumming. And people start doing this.

They start rushing the up strum, or the timing is just a little bit off, or it feels awkward for some strange reason. It's got to be some sort of muscular thing. The upstrom is much harder for people than the downstrom. So let's talk about this. What we're going to do is we're going to over exaggerate an eighth note strumming pattern. So an eighth note strumming pattern is down, up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. So let's start with that. All right, and all I want you to do, we're going to go slow, and I want you to over exaggerate your strumming. Typically, when we strum, we keep our hand really tight to the sound hole. I'm going to have you over exaggerate because we need to build the muscle memory. Okay, so we're going to go 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. All right, that's exactly what we're going to do. Over exaggerate to start. Let's do it again. One and two and three and four and. All right. And all you have to do is just keep looping that. You don't even have to count. You can just do this over exaggerated strumming. And the key is when you strum down, relax. If you tighten your hand after this down. If you strum and you're really tight, in order to get back up on the up strum, you're gonna have to pull against force. So the key to fluid up strums is to remain relaxed in your strumming hand. Because if you do a down strum and you get down here and you're tensing on your pick and I can feel it, my whole forearm is tight, my whole bicep is tight, even my tricep, everything is tight. So in order for me to come back from that, I have to. I have to go through force. Whereas if you're relaxed, you can just strum up nice and smooth. So let's do it again. Nice and exaggerated, nice and slow. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And again. 1 and 2 and. And 3 and 4 and. And you'll see. I'm so relaxed that sometimes I'm missing the strum altogether. But this is a really good exercise for you guys to work on to start developing your strumming in your right hand, particularly for those up strums. Because I know for some people, that's really challenging and can throw off your timing. Once you finish that exercise and you're starting to feel a little bit more relaxed, the then we can work on tightening up the strumming.

And again, the whole thing is this hand acts like a whip in strumming, especially when we get into faster strumming. Your hand is like a whip. It needs to be loose if it's tight. A lot of people, they strum like this. See how tight my wrist is? We want the wrist to be relaxed like a whip. And in the beginning, most people strum with a really tight strumming wrist. Relax it, Relax it. And that's what this exercise does, is it works on you to start relaxing the muscles. Because I find that's the biggest thing that hurts people with their up strums and how they get off of timing and off of rhythm. Their muscles are so tight that when they go to do that up strum, they end up forcing it. And it sounds like this.

They end up rushing it because. Because of that muscle tension. So give this exercise a try for your upstroms. Let me know if it helps you. Leave a comment and a below. And don't forget to subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you guys in the next lesson video.