Beginner Guitar Lesson – Learn To Strum Easier By Understanding Rhythm

Music is all about rhythm and we can learn the guitar faster by understanding the basic of rhythm. Most beginners had a hard time learning to strum in a steady rhythmic motion because they didn’t understand how rhythm works.

There are various strumming patterns to be used for different type of songs, and these strumming patterns are actually rhythmic patterns created by sub dividing the beat in music. Strumming the guitar requires you to move your hand in a steady rhythmic motion but in order to do that you need to be able to feel the beat to keep it steady. Feeling the beat is important because this is where strumming patterns are based upon.

As mentioned above, strumming patterns are created by sub dividing the beat to create a rhythm pattern and to understand that, you need to know the concept of ‘Beat’ and ‘Off Beat’.

Music are commonly written in 4/4 time which means that there are 4 beats for every measure/bar:

The numbers are what referred to as the beat. In between the beats there are off beats represented by the symbol ‘&’ like this:

What you want to be able to do is to develop the ability to know where you are at all times (on the beat or on the off beat). Trained yourself with an exercise below:

The first thing to do is to establish a steady beat and you can do this by tapping your foot. When doing this, make sure that you tap at a reasonable tempo (Start slow) and keep it steady. Try this with me…

* Don’t tap the ‘&’s because if you do this, you will mess up the tempo making it faster.

Chord= Em

Tap 4X |_1_2_3_4_|_1_&_2_&_3_&_4_&_|

* Strum downwards(downstroke) on the ‘numbers’ and upwards(upstroke) on the ‘&’s.

So, above we attempted two rhythmic patterns; On bar 1 we played a basic four strums per bar with each beat receiving one strum each. On bar 2 we played eight strums because this time we’ve included the off beats ‘&’, thus changing the rhythmic pattern into a faster strumming pattern while the tempo remain the same.

* Check out my post about how to change chord smoothly here.