Down strums and keeping steady time
Okay. Five chords, an anchor trick, a metronome habit, and you've survived the dying appliance stage. Today we stop just changing chords and start actually strumming them like a song.
Here's the thing nobody tells you at the start. Strumming isn't really about your hand. It's about your arm swinging on its own schedule, like a pendulum, and your hand just happens to be attached to it with a pick. If you think about the hand, you'll tense up and it'll sound choppy. Think about the arm.
The motion
Down strum only today. Just down. We'll add up strums later, but I want the down stroke solid first before we complicate it.
Set your strumming arm loose at the elbow, not the wrist. A lot of people strum from the wrist and it sounds stiff, like they're flicking water off their fingers. I want the whole forearm moving in a smooth arc, wrist along for the ride, not driving.
Rest the pick against the strings lightly. You're brushing across all six strings, not attacking one. Let gravity do some of the work on the way down.
Practice this with no chord at all first. Mute the strings with your left hand, just rest it flat across all six so nothing rings, and strum a steady down, down, down, down with your right arm like a pendulum. You're listening for even spacing and even volume. Not fast. Steady.
Adding the beat
Once that feels like a natural swing, bring back your metronome. Set it slow, 60 beats per minute is fine.
Strum one down stroke per click. That's it. Four clicks, four strums, all downs.
Now put a chord under it. Start with Em, it's the easiest shape you've got. Strum Em on every click for a full minute. Don't change chords yet. Just get your arm locked to that metronome.
Then try the change you already know: Em to G to C to D. Give each chord four strums, four clicks, before moving to the next one. So it's:
- Em, down down down down
- G, down down down down
- C, down down down down
- D, down down down down
And loop it. This is the same progression from a couple lessons back, except now your right arm has a job the whole time instead of waiting around for your left hand to catch up.
Where it falls apart
Two places, almost always.
First, people rush the chord change and let the strumming arm stop moving while they scramble for the next shape. Don't let it stop. Keep the arm swinging in time even if the chord underneath is a mess for a second. A buzzy chord on beat is better than a clean chord that's late. I know that sounds backwards. It isn't. Time is the skeleton, the chord shapes are the meat, and a skeleton with bad meat on it still stands up.
Second, people speed up without noticing, especially right when a chord change is coming up, like they're trying to get through the hard part faster. The metronome will catch you doing this immediately. That's what it's for.
A word on not hovering over your own mistakes
I made this exact mistake teaching my daughter Mia when she was eight. I corrected every little thing, every time, the second it happened. Wrist too stiff, fix it. Pick angle wrong, fix it. Rushed that change, fix it. She put the guitar down after about a week of that and didn't pick it back up for a year.
So here's my advice to you, same as I eventually gave myself. Pick one thing to fix per pass through the loop. If your arm's not swinging smooth, work on that and let the chord buzz be whatever it's going to be for now. If your timing's rushing, work on that and let your pick angle be sloppy. Trying to fix everything at once is how people quit. I'd rather you get one thing solid and move to the next thing next week.
The opinion part
This is the boring stuff. Down strum, metronome, no flourishes, no fancy strum pattern yet. I know it's not exciting. I don't teach the fast method because the fast method skips this and then people hit a wall in month three where their timing's all over the place and they don't know why. You're building the skeleton right now. It's supposed to feel plain.
A caution
If your fretting hand starts cramping up while you hold a chord through four strums, stop and shake it out. Don't push through a cramp, that's just teaching your hand a bad habit under pain, which sticks worse than a good habit does.
Before next time
Ten minutes a day, same as always. Tune first, then the muted-strings pendulum drill for a minute, then Em to G to C to D at four strums each, metronome on the whole time. If the change still trips you up, that's fine, just don't let your arm stop to wait for it.