Lauren Bateman teaches a percussive strumming pattern built on eighth notes, with a muted 'karate chop' hit on beats 2 and 4. She shows two versions: a subtle palm-snap near the sound hole and an aggressive knuckle strike on the guitar body.
Hey, guitar enthusiasts. I'm going to show you one of the most common percussive strumming patterns. But depending on how you do it, you're going to get a different effect and I'm going to go over both ways in this lesson.
So this was a question I got recently at my live event that I had. Someone was asking me about this percussive rhythm pattern and how exactly to do it step by step because they were having trouble with it. And the first question I had asked them was, well, what exactly is the result you're trying to produce? Because depending on how you do this rhythm, you'll get two different effects. One's a little bit more aggressive and one's a little bit more subtle. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over the strumming pattern. We'll do the subtle version first and the more aggressive version next. And for those of you who don't know me, my name is Lauren Bateman and on this channel I help you make the guitar make sense so that you can have more fun playing the songs that you know and love. So, so the basis of this pattern is an eighth note rhythm. So we're going to start there and we'll use a G chord here. And we're just going to do 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Alright? It's just a simple eighth note rhythm. Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.
Okay, so 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and, and that's the basis that's the foundation of this rhythm. So the next step is what we're going to remove two of these strums for what I call a karate chop. And what we're going to do is on Strum 2 and Strum 4, we're going to get percussive with the guitar. We're trying to mimic a snare drum in a band so it'll sound like this.
Now you can hear it's a very subtle string tap. This is the subtle one. And, and all I'm doing is I'm taking the palm part of my strumming hand and I'm hitting it against the strings. Now where do you want to hit this? You kind of want to get close to the sound hole of the guitar. If you're too far back, you're just going to get kind of this pounding sound. But see, when I get over my sound hole, you get more of that snap of the strings. That's what we're going for. So if you want snap, start back here and move Your hand forward. And when you hear those. Hear the strings snapping, then you know you've got the right spot. So now what we're going to do is we're going to put this little karate chop. All right? And you can see I'm coming into the guitar. I'm not just, like, coming down on the strings. I'm kind of coming into the strings. That's why I call it a chop, because we're coming into the strings, and what we're going to do is we're going to do down, up on the strum, and then chop. So that's two, one and two. Okay. One and two and make sure. This was something I noticed my student was doing at the live event. When he was doing the karate chop, his pick was ending up up here. Hi, Richard. How are you doing? I bet you're watching this video. The pick ended up up here. And we want to make sure when we do that chop that the pick is below the strings down here, because the next drum is an up. So if your pick's up here, you don't want to come back down and then have to go back up. So it's going to be down, up, chop, up. Okay, so that's 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. So we're doing the same thing we were doing before, 1 and 2 and 3, except we're just replacing 2 and 4 with a karate chop. Ready? And 1 and chop. And 3 and chop. And 1 and chop.
And this is something that once you get it speeding up, it sounds really cool. So if you take a song like Proud Mary or something.
Okay. You can. Here it's. It's a really driving, percussive rhythm. So now that you know the subtle version, learn. What's the more aggressive version? Well, the more aggressive version of the karate karate chop is when I really smack the body of the guitar. So you noticed on the subtle version, my hand still remained in a fist. All right. So if you look at the close up here, you see my hand is still in a fist. On the karate chop, I'm actually. On the aggressive karate chop, I'm actually going to stick, extend my fingers because I'm going to try and hit the body of my guitar with my pinky finger. Okay. I'm kind of almost hitting it with the knuckle. Okay. Of my pinky. So listen to the difference. So here's the subtle one.
Now here's the aggressive.
So again, here I'm getting a lot more volume out of my guitar. We're really sounding like that snare drum on a song. So usually when you listen to a song, the snare drum hits on two and four. So depending on what song you're playing, you might want to go more aggressive with your hitting, or you might want to be more subtle. You might not need that full whack. So going back to the aggressive one, it's the same thing. One, and I'm just. Bam. I'm hitting the guitar, and you can hit this. You'll probably see my guitar. I've got pieces of wood missing. I mean, this guitar has been loved over many, many years. But don't be afraid to hit your guitar, okay? You can knock on this thing. Unless you drop, like, a weight from really high, you're not going to break it. You're not going to crack it with your hand. All right? And it's not like you're trying to punch the guitar. We're just whipping the guitar.
Now, you can see on this, I'm not. I'm not really okay the sound hole like I was before. Okay. So remember I said for that subtle one.
Kind of want to be a little bit closer to the sound hole to get the snap of the strings, but with this, because we're using the body of the guitar. Notice my hand. My hand can be behind the sound hole on this. It can be anywhere, really. But obviously, there's a lot more wood here than there is up here with the sound hole. So I tend to do this behind the sound hole, so I get a nice hit on that wood.
If you guys really enjoyed this percussive style of rhythm, then I highly recommend you go check out my expressive rhythm guitar course, where I go over accented rhythms, more percussive rhythm styles, 8th note patterns, 16 note patterns. Lots of cool, different rhythms to take your guitar playing to the next level. So click on the link in the description below if you're ready to make your guitar strumming sound awesome.
