Chords and strumming
Five tips for smoother strumming: how you hold the pick, a relaxed wrist, a steady pendulum motion, keeping your hand moving through chord changes, and hitting different strings on the way down and up.
Strumming always looked simple when I watched other people do it. When I tried it myself, I was frustrated for what felt like forever. About a year in, I was playing campfire songs with friends, looked down at my hands, and realized the strum was going by itself. It doesn’t have to take you a year. None of this will feel natural at first, but five minutes a day on these exercises will get you there much sooner.
Tip 1: Hold the Pick Properly
There are many ways to hold a pick, but this is the best one while you’re learning. Lay the pick on your first finger so it points the same way as your finger, then put your thumb over it at a slight angle. Held next to the guitar, the pick points at the strings.
Grip it tightly enough that it doesn’t fall out, but not so tightly that it’s rigid. It should wobble a little. That flexibility, together with your wrist, is what makes a smooth strum.
Tip 2: Use a Relaxed Wrist
The most important thing is to stay relaxed. On the down strum, the pick tilts up slightly, and on the up strum it turns down, so it brushes across the strings. If the pick is flat against the strings, the sound tends to be harsh.
The motion is quick, a bit like flicking water off your fingers. That gives you a nice brushing sound.
Tip 3: Keep a Pendulum Motion
People often ask how many downs and how many ups a strum has. That’s the wrong way to think about it. Your arm keeps moving down and up the whole time, like a pendulum, and you decide on each swing whether to hit the strings or skip them. Don’t swing too far past the strings in either direction, or it takes too long to come back.
Exercise 1: make a G chord, any way you like. Play down, up, down, then skip the next up, counted “1 and 2 (and).” Repeat it for “3 and 4 (and)” to fill one bar. Then do one bar each of C and D, and finish with one more bar of G. It’s simple on purpose, so you can focus on technique.
Tip 4: Keep Strumming Through Chord Changes
I call this the moment of truth. Students often do fine on one chord, and then it all falls apart as soon as they change to another. The fix: train your strumming hand to keep moving no matter what.
Exercise 2: use the same G, C, D, G progression. On the last up strum before each change, lift your fretting hand and strum the open strings while your fingers move to the next chord. It sounds odd when you’re going slowly, but at normal speed no one will notice, and your strum never stops.
Tip 5: Add Motion to Your Strum
Most beginners hit all the strings on every down strum and every up strum. Players who sound good vary it: they hit the low side of the strings on the way down and the high side on the way up. That gives a strum a sense of motion. By “low side,” I mean the two or three lower strings, rather than only the bass string.
- Alternate: low strings on the down strum, high strings on the up strum.
- Two lows, then two highs.
- Low, high, high. This starts to sound like a real strum.
Once those three feel comfortable, try this bonus: low, high, high, high, skip. It has a galloping feel that pushes the chord changes along. Use the same chord progression for all of them, and keep your wrist relaxed and the pick angled.
A Little Each Day
This is a lot if you try to get it all at once. Work on it a little at a time, five minutes a day, and it will come much sooner than you think.
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