Master The Up Strum - Strumming Lesson for Beginners

Are you someone that is struggling to smoothly strum your guitar, particularly on those upstroms? You feel like you're getting a little hiccup in there, a little start, a little stop when on your strumming. This is totally normal, especially for beginner guitar players who are just learning how to strum and play the guitar. So what I'm going to do in this video is give you some tips on how to solve this problem and what I would do in my studio with students to work through this. So the first thing I want to talk about is the concepts of the down strums and the up strums and their relationship to each other. Because a lot of students, I think they're shocked when I explain this to them because I say, hey, let's start off with just a very, very simple strumming pattern. I want you to do this exercise with me. Let's start with an E minor chord. Hopefully, that's an easy chord that a lot of people know. So it's just first and second fingers on the second fret of the fifth and fourth strings. If you use your second and third, it doesn't matter to me. I just want you to play an E minor chord. Okay, so all we're going to do is four down strums. 1, 2, 3, 4. Basically, very, very basic strumming pattern. And the down strum is. Falls on what we call the downbeat. So if I were tapping my foot, you can't see my foot, but my foot is doing this. If I were tapping my foot along with the rhythm, my foot would hit on the downbeat. Okay? So my down strums are on the downbeat. The numbers one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. 1, 2, 3, 4. Right. So that's usually pretty easy for most students to do. I don't know too many students in my studio, when they're just working on down strums, they just have trouble doing that. They're usually pretty smooth. Everyone can do down strums. The hard part is when we go to put in an up strum. So let's take a. Take example. Let's do 1, 2, 3, and 4. Okay? So it should sound like this, But for some guitar students, it sounds like this. We get. It's like they get a little hop in their strumming. So if that's u. Very, very common. But why this is happening is because there's tension in either your forearm, your bicep, and it's just causing you to have this little, like, robotic spasm almost. So we just need to relax. That's the key for this. But to work on relaxing, we just have to slow down. And I always tell students, we do this over exaggerated strum. Okay? So in the example before where I gave you the four down strums, if you notice my hand moves down and up. All right? So even though I'm only doing four down strums, you can see there is an up strum between those strums. Okay? Now, the reason is you're probably rushing because you think you have to get back to the top for the strum. Our strumming hand really just needs to be doing this. Our strumming hand eventually becomes what we call a metronome. Metronome is a timekeeper. It's a heartbeat. It's a heartbeat in music. Okay. And our hand is just doing this, minding its own business. Okay? But when we start thinking about it, we get tense. And then it starts. It starts jerking like that. So what we want to do as. I just want you to start, we're just going to do it down, up. But instead of keeping your strum really tight like you normally would, I want you to over exaggerate the strum. Make sure you breathe. Okay? So we're going to breathe in. Okay. I just want you to let your hand fall almost. Okay. Because why are we doing. We're trying to remind the strumming hand to stay relaxed. We get down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. Okay. So I'm just letting the hand fall. And once you get your hand relaxed, you don't feel any tension. Bring it back to the guitar. Now we're going to tighten up the strumming a little bit. So it's going to be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. Okay. And if you're feeling it tensing up, don't forget to breathe. Okay? So if we go back to four down strums, it's the same motion. Okay, Now I'm just hitting the strings on the way up. Now let's talk about the pick on this a bit, because another thing that happens with students, particularly on the up strums, is they say my up strums sound like this kind of get like this very, very tinny, ugly sound. And that's something that's going to sort itself out with time. It's also tension. Okay. So when we're first learning to play the guitar, we're holding on to this guitar with a death grip because one, we don't want it to fall in the sound hole, which Happened earlier to me today when I was practicing. And we don't want it to fall on the floor. Like, basically, we just don't want to lose the pick. Happens all the time to me. I've been playing for, you know, a couple decades now. It still happens. All right? You're never going to get rid of it, but you'll get better at it. So what's happening is you're holding onto this pick so tightly, there's no flexibility in the pick to move. Okay? So when we are strumming, essentially what the pick is doing is it's floating up and down like this. So we're holding it tight enough that it doesn't fall out of our hand onto the floor, but also tight enough or loose enough that it has flexibility. Okay. If you cannot do that, here are some recommendations. Recommendation one, get a very thin pick. This is a 0.5 millimeter, great for beginners. And what it does is, even though your grip death, gripping the pick because you don't want to drop it, it takes a little bit of the curse off the pick. And it does the flexibility for you because you might not have the flexibility in your wrist yet to get your guitar pick to do this up, down, up, down thing naturally. Okay. Yet it will come with time as you relax. But if I hold on to this pick really tight, you can hear it already sounds better. I'm going to go back to my thick pick, and I'm going to hold it as tight as I just held it. Little harsher, right? So this lighter pick, so much better. Already sounds so much better. So if you're someone like, oh, my strumming really sounds like crap, try a lighter pick because it'll take some of the curse off for you until your hand relaxes enough that you can hold a thicker pick without, you know, having that harsh sound. The other recommendation. All right, so I just went through all my picks to find this one pick that I was looking for. Of course, it's on the bottom. So this is a max grip pick. Okay. And it feels like sandpaper on the back, so it really gives you a good grip. And I work with a lot of older adults. I specialize in helping students ages 50 and up learn to play the guitar. And something they tell me that I didn't realize, you know, in my 40s, I guess, is as you age, you lose some of the tactileness to your fingers. Your fingertips actually become much smoother, which makes it harder to hold on to the pick. So a lot of my students really like These max grip picks, because of that sandpaper quality, they feel like they can get a better grip on the pick. Okay? And it works just like a regular pick. There's nothing, there's nothing different about it. And they can come. You can get them in thin thicknesses, you can get them in thicker thicknesses, but they just provide a little bit more grip to students, and it'll make it less, less likely if you're death gripping your pick because you're scared it's going to fall on the ground. These will help you hold on to the pick better. And again, eventually, this is something that's going to come with experience. And when you gain experience with something, that's when you relax until you get comfortable with strumming and it becomes a little more second nature. You're always going to kind of muscle it a little bit. And muscle in anything in life is not good when you're trying to relax, okay? So you just want to work on relaxing. And the best way to do that with these up strums is to go very slow, over exaggerate, loosen up your grip on the pick, okay. And really understand that the up strum is no different than a downstrom. It's just you're, you're, you know, you're flexing your, your bicep versus relaxing it. Okay? So there is some muscle, there is some work here, but I'm keeping it very relaxed because if you want to play super fast strumming patterns, you can't do that. If you're, if you're tight, it just won't happen. You have to be able to relax your hand to strum and develop your hand. So if you are having trouble with your upstroms, I highly recommend you keep working on this exercise as part of your warmup. Maybe just two or three minutes a day when you practice. And if you're really looking to work on and develop your strumming, I have a whole rhythm guitar series playlist right over here that will take you through a lot of the basics and help you with developing your strumming even faster. So if this video was helpful, go check out my rhythm and strumming series right over there.