START : INITIAL STEP

A guitar pick produces a clear sound with a lot of treble in it.  The hardness of the pick is important: a very hard pick can make your sound too harsh while a very soft pick produces a 'flappy' sound. A medium thickness gives the best results for strumming.


Keep the strumming very simple in the beginning with this technique called four to the bar. Start counting from 1 to 4 and strum the chord on every count with a downstroke.  A down stroke means you stroke from the thickest to the skinniest string with a pick or your finger. Make sure you play only the strings that are marked with a black or white dot (on the chord diagram).  Failing to do this will make your chord sound bad.

In music notation it looks like this:

Rhythms are written between 2 vertical lines (bar lines):
|                                      |
This is called a bar. Each bar has 4 counts. : this is the symbol for a strum. Each strum like this has a       duration of 1 count.   : the upward arrow tells you that the strum should go from       the thickest to the skinniest string. This is called a        downstroke.

Try this basic strumming pattern on some of the chords. If you succeed in doing this go to the next step:

Now we put an 'and' between the counts: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2... On the counts you strum with a downstroke (), on the 'and' you strum with an upstroke (: from the skinniest string to the thickest).

It looks like this:

 

 : this means that each strum has the duration of a half count. If a couple of these follow each other, the tail is connected:
  -in groups of 4: 
  -or in groups of 2: 

Here are a few more strumming patterns:

In this last example you see a curve between the 2nd and the 3rd count. This means that those 2 notes are played together, so the 2 half notes become a whole note.