Adding upstrums without falling apart
Okay. Five chords, an anchor trick, a metronome habit, and steady downstrums. That's a real amount of guitar in your hands now. Today we add the upstrum, and I'm going to warn you up front, this is the lesson where a lot of people's strumming falls apart for a week or two. That's normal. Stick with it.
Why this one's harder
A downstrum is easy to understand. Your arm goes down, gravity's basically helping you, you hit the strings on the way through. An upstrum asks your arm to do the same job on the way back up, against its own momentum, and hit fewer strings while doing it. Usually just the top three or four, not the whole thing.
Most beginners try to strum all six strings on the upstroke, get a mess of noise, and think they're doing something wrong. You're not doing it wrong. You're doing too much. The fix is doing less.
The mechanics
Here's what I want you to understand before you touch the guitar.
Your strumming arm should already be moving in a constant down-up motion, even when you're not hitting the strings. Think of it like a pendulum that never stops. On the beats where you strum down, your hand happens to make contact on the way down. On the beats where you strum up, it happens to make contact on the way back up. The arm doesn't stop and reverse for each stroke, it's just always swinging.
If your arm stops after every downstrum and then has to start up again for the upstrum, you'll never get this smooth. That's the number one thing to fix.
Step by step at home
- Put your fretting hand down, doesn't matter which chord yet, G is fine.
- Start your strumming arm swinging down-up-down-up over the strings without touching them. Just get the pendulum going. Feel dumb doing this. Do it anyway.
- Now let contact happen naturally. Down stroke hits all six strings. Up stroke, let your hand only catch the top three or four, the ones closer to your knee. You'll feel it, it's a shorter, lighter motion.
- Try it slow. Down, up, down, up, no gaps, no stopping.
- Once that's steady, bring in the metronome from a couple lessons back. Down on the click, up on the space between clicks.
That's it. That's the whole mechanical problem. Input, then result.
A worked pattern
Try this over one G chord, four beats per measure, counted "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and":
- Down on 1
- Up on the "and" after 1
- Down on 2
- (skip the "and")
- Down on 3
- Up on the "and" after 3
- (skip beat 4 entirely, just let your arm swing through empty)
Loop that. It'll feel clumsy for a while. The skipped beats are actually the hard part, because your arm still has to keep swinging through them without hitting the strings. That's the pendulum thing again.
Where this connects to my dad's old dreadnought
When I first restrung my dad Kevin's guitar, the one that had been drying out in his closet for years, I didn't know yet that dry air changes how an instrument behaves. The action had gone strange, a fret buzzed no matter what I did, and I just assumed the guitar was bad. Took two weeks humidifying it in a plastic tub with a damp sponge before it settled down and played right.
I bring that up here because upstrums expose the same kind of thing. If your guitar's out of tune, or the action's off, or the strings are old and dead, the upstrum will sound worse than the downstrum does, and you'll blame your technique when it's actually the instrument. Tune first, every time, before you strum anything. I've said that before and I'll keep saying it. In this dry air with our elevation, guitars drift fast. Rule that out before you decide your arm's the problem.
A real caution
Keep your strumming hand loose. If you grip the pick hard and swing your whole forearm like you're chopping wood, you'll tire out fast and it'll sound stiff besides. Loose wrist, relaxed grip. If your hand starts cramping, stop and shake it out. No reason to push through pain for a strumming pattern.
My honest opinion here
I'd rather you spend two weeks getting a slow, ugly down-up-down-up pattern smooth than rush into a fast strumming pattern that falls apart every four bars. This is boring practice. It's the kind of boring that actually sticks. The apps that promise you'll be strumming a whole song by Friday skip this part, and that's exactly why people using those apps sound choppy for months.
Before next time
Ten minutes a day, same as always. Tune first, then five minutes just swinging your arm without strings, then five minutes on the G chord pattern above with the metronome. Don't rush the tempo. Slow and even beats fast and sloppy every time.