ZAGER Guitar Giveaway // Strumming Tips & Tricks

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Guys, you're gonna have to tell me if you can hear me or not this time. I know there's a few of you on here, so let me know in the chat if you can hear me. I see my microphone light over here. So it seems, it seems to be working. I would say I see the green moving around. So I think we have audio this time. So fantastic. Yay. Awesome. I got my thumbs up. Yay. You're on. Awesome. Thank you so much. So sorry about that 12 o' clock stream. I don't know why I couldn't get the microphone to work, but here we are and it's working. So that's awesome. And you know, technology, it's great when it works and when it doesn't work, it, it's horrible. But I'm so happy that we're here and that I'm with you guys and it's working now. You know, I, I wanted to come on early before a bunch of people jumped on and then we had audio issue again. So welcome, welcome. I was saying hi to some of you guys earlier. Laura. Ma'. Am. So we finally meet. Yes we do. Sahil. Yes we do. Awesome. You guys are here. We've got Richard, we got Jeffrey. Mystic Owl. Thank you for your great energy and instruction. You are absolutely welcome. And I'm going to be doing some instruction today. We have a guitar giveaway that's going on that we're gonna be talking about in a little bit. I want to give some people some time to jump on here. We'll be doing a guitar giveaway that this is sponsored by Zagger Guitars. Okay. And they feature the easy play guitars. I have many students that have these guitars and they, they love them. And I've got a very beautiful. We have a Zagger 80 CE. This is one of their higher end models and I'm going to be playing it in a little bit so that you guys can hear it. It's. It's a beautiful sounding guitar and the best part about it is one of you guys are going to be able to win it or gals. Okay, I do want to preface ahead of time. It is unfortunately a right handed guitar. So preferably for someone who is playing righty. I will see if maybe I can do a left handed giveaway at some point. So I'm going to move my microphone over here so it's not in the middle. But I just wanted to make sure it was working. So I'm glad it's working.

So awesome. Thank you guys so much. Let me know where you're calling in from or you know, we got a Charles Breakville. How are you doing? Canada is in the house. Hello from Macedonia. Holy crap. Holy crap. And the cool thing about this guitar giveaway, you know, I talked to some of my students and they're like, Lauren, you always leave out like your UK people, your Canada people, Australia. And what we're going to be doing today is if you live, if, if you enter to win this guitar and there's a link in the description below and hopefully I've pinned a link to the top, but it's Lauren batemanguitar.com backslash giveaway. Just gonna give me your email in your name. And if you live within the United States, I will pay for the shipping because it's, it's not too expensive to ship within the US probably about like a hundred dollars or so. And you know, so if you're in Kentucky or Wisconsin or Weston, Pennsy, North Carolina, Louisiana. But if you're in like in Belgium, you see Belgium here and I'm in the uk, nowhere near nowhere exotic. That's awesome. Christopher. Well, if you were nowhere exotic in the uk, if you want to pay for shipping, I will ship the guitar to you. It's just, it is, it is expensive right now to ship overseas. I shipped a capo to someone down in Australia and I had to pay to send it a certain way or it wouldn't get there. And it was like $75 to just ship, you know, a $10 Capo. So but it was worth it for the person who was getting it. And, and so, you know, it is an expensive model guitar. This is not a cheap, you know, 300, 400, $500 guitar. If you had to buy this guitar in stores it'd probably be about $3,000. That's what the retail says on their website and they, if you buy it directly from Zagger, it's probably about like eighteen hundred dollars. So it is a very nice guitar. So if you live outside the US and you're willing to pay for shipping to get this guitar to where you live then awesome, we will have you pay for shipping and I will, I will ship it there. If not, don't enter to win the guitar but if you live in the United States, I will pay for the shipping because it's, you know, it's probably going to be about 100 bucks but it's not too crazy. So I will be paying that. So. Hi Bridget. Hi everyone. Welcome back on We've got Sound this time. Let's get into it we're going to do some strumming. So let's. Let's bring out the guitar here. So it comes in a very beautiful case. And the cool thing that I like about this case, look, I still even have the tags on it. I'm even taking the tags off. Now, the cool thing, I'm going to move my microphone off to the side here. The cool thing about this guitar is that or the case is it comes with a humidity. There's a. There's a reader inside. It tells you the humidity within the case. So it's really, really cool. And it comes with this nice. This goes inside the sound hole, and this helps with the humidity within the case of keeping your guitar, well, humidified. All right. And it also comes with a truss rod adjustment in the case as well. Now, let me just tell you a little bit about this guitar. I pulled up and wrote down some specs for you guys, and I might go out of focus just a little bit because I'm coming in and out here. But I want to make sure I have my. My specs for you guys, because I know you're going to ask me a lot. It's. It is a. A gorgeous guitar, Jamie. So you got some, you know, some beautiful, like, mother of pearl, like, really nice inlays. It's a glossy finish. This is a dreadnought size guitar. Just so you guys know, compared to my crafter. Now, my crafter is what we would call a grand auditorium. So it's just a little bit smaller. Now you can see these full size. It doesn't have as big of a hip to it. I. My crafter. Just so you guys can see it, just put this down. Okay. I have my crafter over here because I want to show you guys both guitars. So my crafter has more hips to it. Okay. My crafter has more hips. The zagger doesn't have as big hips. This is a really full body guitar. This zagger. It's gonna have a bigger sound than my crafter, and I'm gonna play it for you guys in a little bit to show you. But this crafter. My crafter is about a half an inch thinner. Okay. This is 4.75 inches wide. The zagger. My crafter is 4.25. So it's just a little bit bigger than my crafter. It's. It feels very comfortable to me. Even though it's slightly bigger, I can feel it. But for me, not. Not a. Not a big issue. I'm just going to tune up again because I. I turned the heat on here, it's cold here, it's the winter. And she probably went out of tune while she was warming up. But beautiful sounding guitar. I'm going to play both of these back to back just so you can hear the difference. And this baby's got some brand new. It's got the pillow touch zagger strings. Let me play without the pick first. Just so you hear the warmth of the guitar. Beautiful G chord. So here we go. Take a listen.

Listen to the bass. You're really going to hear more in the bass on this guitar.

Now, Jen asked, does it feel easy to play the biggest. Notice now the string spacing on these guitars on. On these zaggers, these easy plays, they're a little wider. We're talking about. I think it's like a 30 second of an inch. So it's. It's not huge. I can feel the slight difference, but it's not that big of a difference for me. Where I feel the difference is the bar chords. I would. I would say the open chords are probably equally easy, but where I actually did notice a difference was the bar chords. I feel like these bar chords are definitely easier to play on the zagger versus, versus the crafter. And that has to do with, you know, some of it's the string height. These are set up pretty easily. I lowered the string, the action on this with using the truss rod. So it's very similar to. To the setup on my. On my crafter. But it does have a different bracing system, uses different frets, and also has some different strings. So, you know, the. The bracing system makes it easier for you to. To play the chords. You need a lighter touch. And the spacing of the strings helps with, you know, the muting so that sometimes people, you know, you get that, that sound. So it has a slightly wider spacing on the strings. Strangely enough, because I measured side by side, the neck of my crafter is actually 1 millimeter wider than the neck of this, this zagger. So in turn. So next we're talking millimeters here. Okay. And 30 seconds of an inch. So very, very minor things. You speak so clear and concise. Thank you so much. So here, let me play it again. I'm gonna go jump over the crafter. Just so you guys.

Very, very rich, super, super rich sound. This guitar, the Zagre, after playing it for a little bit in listening, it does sound a little better than my. It does sound better than my crafter. And the reason is, is it has more space because I have more of a hip kind of that, that O M shape with the hip, you lose some of the space inside. Plus that guitar is wider, so you're going to get a bigger sound. Here's my Craftering. Same chords.

So you can hear on that G, there's bass, but it doesn't quite ring out the way it does on, on that Zagger. There's a lot more sound because of that, that dreadnought body style. Beaut. I mean they're both great guitars, but this crap, this. Sorry, the Zagger, I've been playing it all morning because I wanted to give you guys a good assessment. And it's a beautiful sounding guitar. So we have very nice tuning pegs. These are the Grover, the world's finest machine heads. We also have some Fishman electronics. Now this is the Zagger 80 cell easy play guitar. And the, the scale is the same. They're both the 25 and a half scale. This has 20 frets. My crafter has 21.

And other than that, the Crafter, if you were to buy this, you know, when it was big, I don't know if you can get my Crafter anymore, but it was about 13.99 retail was what my Crafter was. And I saved a couple hundred dollars because I knew the guy selling it. This retail 17.95, this guitar. So it's a, it's a beautiful guitar. It plays very nicely. It's a very nice playing guitar. You don't have to struggle. I feel like you don't have to struggle. And like I said, I feel it more in the bar chords.

I can feel it more on the bar chords, particularly these lower strings. It is definitely much easier for me to, to squeeze on the bottom. Now, I don't know what size strings these came with. If these are elevens.

They still, they feel about the same. Maybe these are tens. These could be a little bit lighter than what I have on my guitar, which would make it easier to play those bar chords. But even with the light strings, even if it is a lighter string, the, the sound on this is so big. It's, it's definitely very, very, very beautiful sound. So if you guys are interested in winning this guitar that I'm going to use for this lesson today, just go to laurenbatemanguitar.com give us your name, give us your email, because we have to, we have to have a way to contact you to get your address. Do you live in the United States? I will ship it to you for free. Okay. Zagar sent it to me. Absolutely no cost to give away to one of you guys. So thank you so much to Zagre Guitars for doing that. And if you live outside the United States, if you want to win this guitar, you can still enter. You just have to pay for the shipping, that's all. We wanted to make it inclusive to everyone. So thank you to my students for, for suggesting that. Hello from the uk Danny, how you doing? Bonjour. Bonjour. I, I took like one year of French in 8th grade UNFIE. That's about all I remember. And I can probably say the Hail Mary and in French too, because I, I went to a Catholic school. So let's talk about some strumming so that you guys can hear more of this guitar because this is something people, students ask me all the time. Lauren, how do I work on my timing? How do I work on my strumming? My strumming sounds so bad. Well, let's talk about this. So the biggest thing with strumming and timing that I find students do is they rush the foundation, they rush the basics. Now the basics of rhythm that I focus on with a lot of my students, especially in the seven level guitar system. Okay? And if you're interested in my course, Lauren batemanguitar.com backslash course, I pinned a link to the chat there. You can go check out the course, but we focus on first the actual timing of whole notes. Okay? Now a whole note is four beats. A lot of songs that you'll be learning in the beginning have four beats to them. Okay? So I tell students, if you can just get in the habit of counting and getting the feel of the timing and the strumming, then you will be so much better. Yeah, Willie. Robert. Robert. Robert Wills asks how to enter again. Lauren batemanguitar.com backslash giveaway Lauren bateman guitar.com backslash giveaway okay, link is in the description below this video. So first we would start off with quarter notes, counting. Can we count to four? Let's just go from E minor. Okay, we'll go E minor to G. And if you need to use easy G, that's totally fine too. But I'm just going to play the full chords just for this example. So I would go 1, 2, 3, 4, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, three, four. 1, 2, 3, four. And we would just go back and forth with that timing. And you can see I can talk to you guys and keep my timing going here with my finger, you see it moving up and down. 3, 4. So that is the goal. The goal is can I be so in tune with with just one strum that I can keep my timing. Okay. And usually what we would do is we would put this to a metronome. Okay, so I have a Metronome Beats app on my phone. So let me just pull up a metronome. So you guys see how I used to work with my students, live in my studio. This is what we would do. We would pull up a metronome. And I don't want to download anything. I'll go to 100 just to make it fast for you guys. But we usually wouldn't start at 100, but maybe we would. It's kind of fast. Let's go to 80. Okay, so this is 80 beats per minute. Can you guys hear that clicking? Okay, so click, click, click, click. So what I would do is we would just strum and count with the metronome first. We would get our timing. What's the timing? Two. Ready? And 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 3, 4. 1, two, three, four. One, two. Okay, and you're like, lauren, I get it. I can count to four. Great. Awesome. But now can we count to four while adding the chords? Okay, so we're gonna go back to E minor and G. And you can see I'm just feeling what this rhythm is. The rhythm is in my body. Okay. Eventually, you will feel Just feel rhythm. But it takes time for that to happen. So here we go. We're going to start in E minor. 1, 2, 3, 4. We got 1, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. 1, 2, 3, Four. 1, 2, 3.

Hey, you feel that? So that's the key, is like, okay, I got the timing, I got the foundation. I can count to four. And it's like, great. Can we count to four now and strum four times and stay in time? Because a lot of times what happens is students will tell me, lauren, you know, I got the strumming pattern down, and then I'll go over and I'll play a song, and I end up getting ahead of the song, or I end up losing my timing, and I get lost, and. And that's, you know, it's a very common thing. We tend to speed up or we tend to slow down. Okay, so what we're going to do now is we're going to hit this. Usually in the course, we would take it to the next step. We would play half notes. But for this example, we're going to go to quarter notes. Now, quarter notes is one down strum per click on the metronome. All right, so what we're going to do, we're going to play that metronome again. We just want to listen. I always tell students, listen first and then bring it to the guitar. Because if you're playing, you're not listening and you're losing part of the learning experience. So listen.

Okay, that's our rhythm. Now we're going to put it over the chords. Okay? Four strums on E minor, four strums on G. So it'll go like this. One, two, three, four, two G.

Okay, again. Hear how I'm dialed in with that metronome. Now, the downside is metronomes can feel very robust, robotic. It's sometimes easier to go off of someone else's timing. That's why in the course, not only do we use the metronome, but you play along with me like we're doing here. I will just go, okay, we're going to do E minor to C. Let's go. And you will play with me back and forth. So we work on that. Those chord changes in that chord timing in the guitar course. And students find it very helpful because sometimes it's hard in the beginning for students to lock in with this. With this metronome. Upstate New York in the house.

Double sided tape helped me to learn the right feel for the pick. Interesting. Interesting. I've never used double sided tape. So most students get to that point and they're like, this is great. I'm fine. Okay, I can do whole notes. I can do quarter notes. I'm feeling great. And then you go to add in an up strum, and you're like.

And all of a sudden the whole thing falls apart because you started to try add up strums. And I always tell students, you know, the thing with up strums is you don't know it, but you're already doing them, and you're already doing them in time. You're just not focused on them. Okay, so watch my hand. Watch my strumming hand. I'm going to go back to that quarter note pattern. Watch what my hand does. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. What's my hand doing? Do you notice every time I do a down strum, my hand has to come back up to do the next down strum.

Guess what?

There's your up strum. It's already built into your strumming pattern. I just didn't tell you yet. But we get so focused because now we have to hit strings and that. And then we get tense, and all of a sudden our hand is like jerking around and we, we want to Just relax. And the biggest thing with strumming and timing that I tell students, go slow, like Walkman battery dying and your Walkman slow. Okay? I know a lot of you guys will get that. That reference. Okay? The battery is dying in your Walkman, and we.

Go slow. Okay, that slow. It's not.

No, It's. It's slow. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And. And if you want to just try putting one strum in, just try going one and two, three, four. One and two, three, four. And I'm not even switching chords here. I'm just staying on one chord. We're focusing on the timing and the rhythm, okay? And. And that's the big thing, because most students are like, okay, good, I got it. Let's go.

And they. You know, you want to play fast because most of the songs are faster, but in the beginning, go very, very slow. I promise, if you go slow, it gives your brain enough time to process. Okay?

If you go too fast, you start making mistakes and you start getting frustrated, you know, frustrated. And you're like, this. This stinks. This sounds horrible. It's not going to work. It will work. You just got to go. So, yeah, that's me. Want to play fast? We all do. Trust me, when I was learning drums, I always wanted to play fast on the drums. And I knew. I knew as a teacher, I'm like, you know, slow it down, Lauren. Slow it down. Very slow. It's actually better to practice your timing. It's hard to stay in time. The slower you go, the faster you go, the easier it is. But let me tell you guys a story and how important this timing is. So I went to a recording studio, and on one of my last albums, there's a song called One More Time. And we went into the recording studio, and we were listening to the scratch track. So what happens is I go into the recording studio first, before the band, before anyone else, and I go into the recording studio first, and all I do is I play to a click track like this. Okay? I have headphones on, and I hear a click track, and that's all I hear. And I have to play the entire song in time with that click track. If I get off time, we have to redo the whole take, okay? We have to redo the whole thing. So this is the track that all of my band is going to play off of. So you build these songs in layers. We got into the recording studio when my bass player, my drummer in, and we listened to the scratch track and the drums and the bass Are coming through. And I was like, this is too slow. It was like five beats per minute too slow. And I could hear it. The song felt like it was dragging. I said, we have to. We have to do another scratch track. So if you guys go. Actually, if you search Lauren Bateman one more time, I made a music video of me in the studio, and that's actually me. We ended up doing a live scratch track. So I played live with a metronome, with my band, or with my drummer in my bass player. So I had to have perfect timing for that entire take that we were doing the scratch track live. So it just goes to show you how important timing is and how important it is to work with a metronome and work on your timing, because not only does it help you with timing. I don't know if you guys can see there's. There's a number on here, right? This is your scorecard. This is telling you how well you're doing. A lot of students, you know, they get frustrated in the beginning, and they're like, I don't know if I'm getting better. Everything I did with my students, everything was put to a time. Okay. Last week, you know, if we were learning a song, say we were learning Horse with no name. Hey, Last week we did it at 60 beats per minute. This week we did it at 80. Let's try it for a hundred next week or whatever the full speed of the song was. I used to always show that to people because it's encouraging to see that number going up. Right. So I noticed listening to my recordings, they sound different than my actual playing. Yeah. Because what you hear and you know, what a microphone picks up can be. Can be very different. And for those of you jumping in just now, I am playing the Zagger.

80C E. This has the Fishman electronics beautiful system. This. I plugged it into my amp. It sounds great. Very loud. This would actually be like a performance level guitar. This is a great guitar for you guys to win. I was really shocked when Zagger sent me a guitar. I was expecting them to send me, like one of their, like, you know, 600 easy plays. No, they sent me an 80 CE to give away to you guys. So this is pretty amazing. So even if you do not win the guitar today, we. We're picking a winner February 28th. Okay, so even if you enter and you don't win the guitar, please go give Zagger some love. They gave us five guitars to give away last month that we're shipping out that we gave away to some veterans, those were the, the lower end model. Easy plays but still those are like five or six hundred dollars. So what a great company. And, and I love that they helped us in supporting our veterans and I love that they' giving away this guitar to you guys and, and that we're going to be working together. So this is fantastic. So this is the adce and as I was demonstrating earlier, beautiful, beautiful bottom end on this. And it's because of that bigger, the more dreadnought size guitar. Now you guys have seen my video. Like Lauren Dunkin, a dreadnought, it's too big. This feels comfortable to me. I've also been playing guitar for a while, so, you know, holding a guitar is comfortable. It feels very comfortable in my arms. Even though it's a dreadnought, I still would probably prefer a grand auditorium size like my crafter over here. But this is a beautiful guitar. If you wanted to go in a recording studio with this beautiful sound. Now this has, I just looked it up. It's Indian rosewood. So the back in the side you see the darker color Indian rosewood. And then we have red cedar is the soundboard. The neck is African mahogany. And the headstock is up here. You can see the dark wood. Again, the Indian rosewood. Okay, so very, very high quality guitar here. I mean, this is one of their top of the line. The next lineup. The top of the line is the 90. Okay. This is an 80 and the top of the line is the 90. So this is almost right to the top. Beautiful, beautiful guitar zagger for the win 100%. She uses the Metronome beats. Yes, Metronome. I have an Android. I. I'm an Android person. Sorry, Apple. I'm not an Apple person. I don't like their products. My brain does not work that way. But I'm not knocking Apple. For those of you guys who love Apple, they do. Apple does have their own app for Metronome, but the one I use, I have a Google Pixel Android phone. You can use Metronome Beats. That's the app that I use. Okay. Yeah, absolutely beautiful guitar. Yeah. And I mean you can see these inlays like the mother of pearl. You can see the details. I mean, these are kind of trims and accents that you would get on guitars that were like two to three thousand dollars. Okay. So this is a really high quality, well made guitar. Julie plays guitars. Thank you so much for the, the Super Chat donation. Appreciate that. If you guys want to do a Super Chat donation, always, always appreciate that you guys supporting the lessons here. Thank you so much, Julie. Really appreciate that. Now again, like I said that we've got the Gordon. I'm sorry, not Gordon Grover tuning pegs up here. The great thing about these versus a guitar that's like a hundred bucks is this guitar is going to stay in tune pretty good. Now this, this guitar, I smell it. It smells like brand new wood. This is a freshly made guitar. So it's. It is brand new wood. So it's going to adjust over the first couple of months. I've had it here for a few weeks, so it has been adjusting. I had it in the case and I did have to retune it completely tuned down almost a whole note just from the wood adjusting and the adjustments with the heat here. So this is going to adjust within, you know, the first year. It's brand new wood. It smells like brand. I've never smelt a guitar that was brand new wood. That's. That's awesome. It's like that new car smell. It's the new guitar smell. Okay. Absolutely. Beautiful, beautiful sounding guitar. I mean, the quality on this is. Is amazing. You know, like I said, this is about an 1800 guitar. If you went to Zagger's website and you looked up the Zagger 80 CE, it's 17.95. All right. And you guys are gonna win this. Okay. And it's. It's a beautiful guitar. The action, like I said, I. I adjusted the action. They probably shipped it a little bit higher because in shipping that's good for the guitar. I lowered the action down just a little bit, but I mean, it's pretty steady. When you look at, when I look at the first three frets, I mean, this fret, the string is so close to that first fret. And most of us in the beginning, this is where we're playing, right? These first three frets. So having a nice low string action makes the guitar easier to play. Just did a video recently on the boat or guitar. If you guys saw that, it's much easier to press a string this far versus pressing a string that far. Right? Thank you, Brad. Thank you. Long overdue. Appreciate it. Brad. Thank you so much for the, the super chat donation. You guys are the best. Love it. Okay, again.

This far versus this far. You have to push so much more to get. And again, we're talking millimeters. We're not talking inches. We're talking very small margins here. But sometimes those small margins make a big difference. And for a lot of guitars, this one, the truss rod. Most acoustic guitars, the truss rod is in the Sound hole. And all it is is a little Allen wrench and you turn it and actually Denny has a little note that he says thank you from Denny. So this is from Denny. And inside it gives you instructions on how to adjust the truss rod for this. Brian, I'm a lifetime platinum. She is awesome. Thank you, Julie. So you know, Mr. Zaggler designs his guitar so you can dial in the string height. So turn clockwise, turn clockwise to lower the string height and turn counterclockwise to raise the string height. Now why, what are the pros and cons? So the pros of lowering your action, making the strings closer. Thank you Corey for your Super Chat donation. Appreciate it. The lowering the strings makes it easier to play the chords, but you have to have a lighter touch because if you hit the chords too tight.

You'Re going to get more string buzzing. So that's the trade off. So if you are a heavy player and you don't have a light touch, you might not want to lower them too much or you're going to get some string buzzing. Okay. This happens a lot on my electric guitars. I like low action, but I am a hard player so I have to remember to have a lighter touch when I play my electric. Thank you, Charlene. Thank you so much. Super Chat donation. So I have to remember to have a light touch or I get a lot of string buzzing. And so I typically on my acoustics maybe have it just up just a fraction higher than where I have my electrics. But that's because I, you know, I. When I get into strumming, you know, especially if you got a song. I don't know if you guys saw my Guns n Roses. My Guns N Roses lesson. Like when I get into a song, I just get into it and I start strumming and it just goes. Okay, so pros, everything in life has trade offs. Okay, talking about guitar design again, let's bring up the crafter again here just so you guys can see it. Okay. Different body style. Okay. This is a full acoustic. They both have, they both have cutaways. Okay. I like cutaways on my guitar. Some people don't care. I just, I just think it looks better. I think it looks sexy.

I. And I like a guitar with some curves. Okay. So this is more of an OM style. So you can see it has more, more hips to it. More of that hourglass feel figure. More of the pear shaped figure here on the dreadnot. If we're, we're talking about body styles. But the difference is this is a bigger guitar thank you, Dave. Dave, one of my. One of my students. Thank you for the super chat donation. You guys are awesome. I love you so much. This is a bigger guitar. It's also a wider guitar. Okay, what are the trade offs? This is going to have a bigger sound every single day. Every single day of the week. This is going to have a bigger sound because there's more space inside the guitar for the sound to resonate. This still has a beautiful sound. This is a grand auditorium style. So it's kind of like one step down from a dreadnought. I was telling people earlier, this is a half of an inch, half of an inch thinner than this dreadnought. This dreadnought was 4.75 inches when I measured it. And my crafter is 4.25. Okay, so happen. I mean, it's enough. It's a good size. Okay. We're not talking like a, you know, it's a good size difference and I can feel it. But that's why this guitar, when I played it. Let's go back to the crafter real quick for you guys. Okay. Everything else is pretty similar between the two, but listen to this. G chord.

E minor.

Hey, fishing for days. Thank you so much for the donation. I love it. Okay. G, G and E minor. And I choose those two because you get the six string. You can really hear that bass. Listen to the bass now on this one. It's just gonna be so much richer.

And I might. After this guitar, I might have to switch to dreadnoughts or, I don't know, maybe I need to get a dreadnought. The sound is just so big. I don't know if you guys can hear it well enough through the microphone. It's night and day to me. It's night and day. And I love the sound of my crafter. And I've gone into recording studios and people have said, wow, that I can't wait to record that guitar. It sounds great, but this, it really does have a beautiful sound. The playability is wonderful. People were asking me because this is an easy play guitar, Lauren, is it easier to Play now at 17:95? I will be completely honest with you guys. At 17:95, the guitar better damn well play easy. Okay, that's just my preface. But when I was playing between the two guitars, between my crafter and my zagger, I did notice more so on my bar chords, which tend to be more challenging because they require more strength. I did notice on my bar chords that it was slightly easier to play and get them to sound on my crafter, I do feel like I have to squeeze a little extra on the bottom of this finger. So I didn't know. It's very slight. It's, it's, it's very slight, but I can feel it. Okay. I've been playing guitar for a long time, so I can feel it. So I would say yes, there is something in the design, whether it's the custom bracing. So they use a custom bracing system and it could be the strings too. These are the pillow touch strings. I don't know much about the pillow touch strings, but they seem like they're very light strings so they are easier to play. Just based on my assessment of two equivalent guitars, my Crafter, like I said, 13.99 retail, was my Crafter. This is 17.95. Probably like they said, if you went and bought this from a retailer, this would probably be like a three thousand dollar guitar. If you bought it off of like a guitar center. But if you buy it direct from Zaga, you save a lot of money. So that's the great thing. And you can just tell this is, this is quality made, it's custom made. Denny makes them all. That's why if you go, if you. On his website right now it says he's three days behind on his orders because he is, you know, they are custom making these to order. So. Thank you. What do we have? MRA. Mick. Thank you so much, Mr. A. A. Mick, I'm guessing. Thank you so much for your super chat, Don. Love it. Yeah, the difference is very noticeable. Good. I hoped it would come through on here just so you guys can hear. And, and you know, everyone asked me, you know, Lauren, can you recommend a guitar? And it's one of the, the worst. It's. As a guitar teacher, it's probably one of my most hated questions because. Only because guitars are so personal. They really are. Like I said, I prefer just for my body size. I'm about 5, 4 and 3 quarters if you want to get very specific. I'm not very tall. Okay. But I'm not five feet. I'm about five five. And Richard De Silva from New Hampshire. Thank you Richard. You're the best. Thank you so much. Now I'm not very tall. This feels comfortable though. Does feel comfortable to me even though I'm only 5 5. So if you're above 5 5, this will probably feel comfortable to you. The fretting feels very comfortable. I can feel a slight difference on the spacing. Not much. It's, it's very minimal. But I noticed the first time I picked up this guitar and I tried to play open chords, it did feel awkward for a split second because I'm used to the spacing on my crafter, but I've completely adjusted to that now.

And it feels completely normal. I wouldn't say there's any downside, even for finger picking.

So in terms of the playability, very similar. I felt it in the beginning because it is a slight difference, and I immediately felt that because I've been playing the guitar for so long. I mean, I'm so used to my crafter, I can't feel the difference so much anymore, so. And I think the neck widths are very, very similar. I have to measure.

But looking at them, you know, because they say on their site that they have a slightly narrower neck to make it easier to reach around. So this could be slightly narrower. And again, we might be talking millimeters. Very hard to see by eye. So, you know. But again, beautiful guitar, and if you would like the opportunity to own this, we're giving away this guitar February 28th. You can enter to win on any time. Okay, so this is going on through February 28th, and you just got to give us your name and an email. If you live in the United States, congratulations. I'm gonna pay to ship it to you. I have the box and everything. It's got a beautiful case. I just. I don't want to put this on the floor. I'm gonna. We'll lean the crafter. She. You know, she. She's got some war scars. I don't know if you've guys seen her. I have a beautiful crack. I don't know if you can see it here. I was gigging one day, and I have my microphone. Stupid me. I have my microphone in my gig case, and I shut my trunk and I cracked my guitar with my microphone. Now, fortunately, my good friend over at Carlino Guitars in Medford who sold me the guitar, he was able to fix it up and make it look nice. So. So she's beautiful, but she's got some more scars. But you know what that means. She's been loved and she's been played and she's been cared for, and she's brought a lot of joy to my life. So I know some of you are like, give away the crafter instead of the zagger. No, I will. I will never give this guitar away. I love this guitar. I've had it probably about a decade, maybe a little bit more, but I love her. So let's just talk about this case. Beautiful Case just so you guys can see it. Okay. Very, very beautiful case. Zagger guitars established 1969. And I'm going to open it up. I can get it open. So there is a storage pack inside here. But you can see. Is it here? Oh, it's down the bottom here. There's. You probably can't see it in the video. Maybe you can see the reflection. This is the humidity meter. It tells you the humidity level in the case, which is absolutely phenomenal. And like I said, Zagger, this goes in the sound hole and I'll ship this with this back in the sound hole and it will keep the humidity nice. Nice and clean for you guys. Comes with an allen wrench for your truss rod. Also comes with a lock. And there is also, just so you guys know, looks like there's like a little, little T shirt in here for you guys. There's a user guide for the Fishman Electronics. There is also, if you guys want to, you can add the pick guard to the guitar. I particularly don't like pick guards, but that's just a preference. Again, that's why I hate when people are like, what do you recommend it's preference. But you could add this pick, it's just a sticker and you can add it to the guitar to protect it from the pick. Okay, so that's an option. It's in the case and that's up for you guys to decide. I will show you why that might be beneficial.

You may have heard me say earlier, I. Where's the crafter? There she is. I am a very heavy picker. Okay, you, you. It might be hard to see, but if you look at my hummingbird here, there's actually pieces of wood. Wood missing from strumming. I have more so on the upstrums than probably the downstroms. I have dug wood out of my guitar and eventually if I kept playing this, I would dig a hole completely through the wood. And I've seen guitar players with holes in the bottom of their guitars and then sometimes they put a pick guard over it to cover the hole. But I don't particularly like them. I like the natural wood look. I also have this beautiful inlay. So why would I want to put. Why would I want to pick, pick guard over that? But just so you know, over time, if you are an aggressive strummer like I am, you could pull the wood out of your guitar. And this has a glossy finish. This is a satin finish. So there's a little bit more protection with the glossy finish and the, the pick Scrape marks will probably show up a little bit more on a glossy finish than a satin finish. So that's why I prefer guitars myself. Again, preferences. I like guitars with satin finishes also because a, if you see the light glare, I have lights and stuff. The, the glossy finish reflects the light so much more. Thank you so much, Keith Murray for your super chat donation. You guys are awesome. I love this so much. So thank you guys for coming again. If you want to win this beautiful zagger. Lauren Bateman guitar.com backslash giveaway Lauren Bateman guitar.com backSlash giveaway and if you are interested in checking out my beginner guitar course, if you like some of the stuff I taught you today about strumming and you love my teaching style, YouTube's great. Guys like don't, don't get me wrong, I have tons of stuff on YouTube. I have students who learn from YouTube all the time. But sometimes it's really nice to have that structure. So if you're looking for a little bit more structure in your learning. Laurenbatementguitar.com backslash course laurenbatementguitar.com, backslash course and you can go check out the seven level guitar system. There's some students who are in the chat here. They can probably tell you about their experiences with the course. It's, it's, it's really great. Tommy Emanuel scare Yeah. Well, Tommy Emanuel, just so you guys know, one of the guitar brands he plays is a Zagger guitar. He's. Tommy Emanuel is branded with Zagger guitars.

I think Sully no, someone from Godsmack plays Zagger. Lady Gaga. They've got a few big name. I think Johnny Cash's guitar player was a Zagger guitar player. They're getting some big names over to their brands and, and that's part of why, you know, I reached out to them. They actually didn't reach out to me. Just so you guys know the story behind me and Zagger guitars. Thank you. Thank you. Someone saying about the seven level guitar system is awesome. Highly recommend. Thank you so much. Day Spring.

I reached out to Zagger because one of my students, one of my students, Brian, we had a veteran who was going blind in our group and I gave him access to, to the beginner course. He had reached out to a couple of, couple of guitar companies. I think he reached out to Martin and maybe one other and he reached out to Zagger and Dennis. Dennis junior. Dennis junior he's on the email customer service at this company. Let me just you I send an email, I get a response within 24 hours, sometimes the same day. I mean, their customer service is amazing. And we emailed them telling them about this, this particular student of ours that was going blind, he was a blind veteran. And Zagger Guitar said that they were going to send us some guitar, you know, guitar up for this guy. Now when the guitar arrived, not only were we surprised to find a guitar for this gentleman whose name was Al, they also sent us five extra guitars to give away to veterans in need. So that's what we did. We did a giveaway that we, we reached out to veterans. We did a giveaway just like this. And I said, if you're a veteran that's always wanted to learn guitar and you can't afford a guitar and you can't afford lessons, let us know. And, and we did a giveaway and I want to thank Zaga Guitars for that because that was amazing. So I actually reached out to them as a company, just saying, like, if you guys are that supportive of veterans, then I have to do something with your company because, you know, I love the military. I love our veterans. Thank you all for your service. Any of you who are my, are my students know that, that I do stuff for veterans all the time. And I really, really appreciate your sacrifice and all that you've done. Even if you're not in the U.S. say, if you've served your country in the UK, thank you for your service because you're doing great things, you know, for your country. So, so we appreciate that. And we gave away six guitars in total. So far, we've shipped out two of them. The gentleman who was helping me with the guitars and shipping them out, he did get, he did get sick and was in the hospital for a little bit. So he's, he's recovering now. And we were able to ship out two guitars before that time. So we're waiting just to ship out the last four. But we, we had six people, six veterans who in need that, that had guitars. And you know, I read some of the stories, so, so they were beautiful stories and I'm glad that we sent those guitars out. So. And thank you to you guys because your super Chat donations, we use those super Chat donations from that giveaway to, to, to mail the guitars to the students. So it didn't even cost us. I was going to pay for the shipping, but you guys made donations and we ended up not even having to pay for the shipping. So you guys are awesome. Thank you so much. Yes, thanks veterans for your service. Lauren. Thanks for. Veteran veterans can also check out guitars for Vets at another resource. Yes, Guitar. Guitars for Vets is a great, great. I don't want to say company because they're not a company. I think they're a non profit and they help out veterans that are interested in playing guitar. They have chapters all over the United States. I don't know if they're outside of the US but I know they have chapters all over the United States and I think they supply guitars and they supply lessons and you know, I'm trying to do more stuff with them. I've had a few students who've reached out to me love to start making some donations to Guitar for Vets. So we'll work more on that and do a lesson on Serenity by Godsmack. I don't know if I know. I probably know Serenity if I listen to it. I actually saw God smack many many moons ago at a WBCN river rave. I think I was like 14 many many moons ago. I know you guys all think I'm, I'm like young. I'm a little bit older than some of you think. I know what my Ninja Turtle T shirts but so and free medical too. Look at that. That's awesome. Didn't know that. Well guys, thank you so much for joining me today and thank you to everyone who made a super chat donation for today's strumming lesson. Really appreciate it. And you know I'll probably just use the super Chat stuff to donate more stuff to our veterans because. Because that's what I do whenever I get donations from people. We give away some free courses or you know, I bought some extra picks, I bought pics and, and other things to send out to the vets as well. So thank you guys so much for your Support here on YouTube. I love doing these lives and getting to chit chat with you guys. Guitars for Vet is also in Canada. Thank you so much. I didn't know that. So Guitar for Vets is also in Canada. For those our Canadian friends here, you are so so welcome. And again Lauren batemanguitar.com backslash giveaway Lauren batemanguitar.com Backslash Giveaway and if you're interested in the seven level guitar system. Lauren batemanguitar.com Backslash Course. Okay, those are the two links enter to win this beautiful guitar from Zagger. Thank you so much to Zagger Guitars for, for sending this over. Absolutely beautiful guitar and one of you guys I hope is gonna win it and show it a lot of love and I'll see you guys in a lesson video real soon. Thank you, everyone. Have a good one. Bye Bye. It.