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Strumming Technique

Lesson Book page 2 Free preview

The elbow joint should be placed near the top of the guitar to make a fixed pendulum. The shoulder joint should not move when strumming.

When strumming, use a pendulum motion for both down and up strums.

  1. The picking hand above the strings at the top of the sound hole, pick angled to the strings.
  2. The hand swinging down across the strings.
  3. The hand further through the strum, keeping the same angle.
  4. The hand past the high e string at the end of the down strum.

In the images, you can see that the guitar pick can have a break angle to the strings. This helps to keep the strum smooth. You can adjust this break angle to create different strumming textures. This also works for single note flat picking.

Here are the down and up strumming symbols.

Down
Up

Pattern labeling

All right-hand diagrams are labeled for quick reference.

For example, pattern 5C can be found on pg. 5 and is the third pattern (5A, 5B, 5C) listed on the page.

5C ♩ = 90
341&2&3&

Pattern H in the Inversion Guitar Chord Method

Reading the diagrams

  • The six lines are the strings, with the low E string on top. The counts of the bar run along the top.
  • Press ▶ on any pattern to hear it looped. Pick the chord and tempo in the bar above the patterns, and turn the metronome click on or off.