Oct 27 2008
Strumming patterns for the guitar
When you have gotten past the single notes contained on each of the six strings on a guitar, you are likely ready to move on to chords. Instead of ‘plucking’ single strings at a time, with chords you will be strumming. Strumming is plucking all the strings in unison either by striking them all at once from top to bottom or bottom to top. When you strum from top to bottom, it is called an downstrum, when you strum from bottom to top, it is called a upstrum.
If you only played downstrokes or only upstrokes, your chord progressions would probably sound pretty boring.That is why there are many patterns that you can vary your chord strokes in. Once you have been playing a while it gets easier and more natural to simply sense these pattern. To begin, we’ll look at some easy ones.
Here are some strumming patterns that you can use along with most of the demonstrations and exercises on this website. Use the / symbol to indicate downstrokes and the \ symbol for upstrokes. The demo is also timed for you counting four beats. Tap your foot four times for each bar and strum accordingly to how many strums equal a beat.
$ D D U D U D | D D U D U D
G/ / \ / \ / C / / \ / \ /
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
