Two or three patterns that fit most songs
Okay. Five chords, an anchor trick, a metronome habit, steady downstrums, and upstrums that mostly don't fall apart. That's alot of pieces. Today we stop adding new pieces and just build you two or three strumming patterns you can actually use on real songs.
Here's the thing nobody tells beginners. You don't need twenty patterns. You need two or three you can grab without thinking, and then you fit the song to the pattern, not the other way around. Most songs you'll ever want to play at a kitchen table use some version of what we're doing today.
Pattern one: Down, Down-Up, Up-Down-Up
This is the workhorse. Say it out loud first, before you touch the guitar:
D, DU, UDU
Count it against four beats like this:
- Beat 1: down
- Beat "2 and": down, up
- Beat "3 and 4 and": up, down, up
That's eight strums total in one measure, but your hand doesn't stop moving even on the strums you skip. This is the part that trips people up, so I'll say it plain: your strumming arm keeps swinging in time the whole way through, like a pendulum. You just don't always let the pick hit the strings. The beats you "skip" are ghost strums. Arm still moves, pick just floats over.
Loop this on a G chord for two full minutes before you add any chord changes. Don't rush to make it musical yet. Just get the arm moving right.
Pattern two: Down, Down, Up-Down-Up
Simpler, works for a lot of slower songs:
D, D, UDU
- Beat 1: down
- Beat 2: down
- Beats "3 and 4 and": up, down, up
Same ghost-strum rule applies on any beat you're not hitting.
Pattern three (optional today): All downs, but grouped
If pattern one and two feel like too much, you can get by on straight downstrums with a little variation in emphasis, hit beat 1 harder than the rest. That's a legitimate pattern. I know some of you are still stabilizing your downstrums and that's fine. Don't force pattern one before you're ready. Super common mistake is trying to run before the arm knows how to swing.
Fitting it to a chord loop
Take your Em to G to C to D loop from a few lessons back. Pick pattern one. Play it through the whole loop, four full strums per chord, don't change the pattern when you change chords. That's the whole trick of "it fits most songs." The pattern stays constant, the chord shape changes underneath it. Your strumming hand should basically not care what your fretting hand is doing.
If the chord change is late and the strum pattern gets there before you do, that's a change speed problem, not a strumming problem. Go back to counting beats slower, not abandoning the pattern.
A story about doing this the hard way
My neighbor Brock brought a guitar over to my driveway a while back with the strings restrung upside down. He'd followed some blurry video and gotten the low E where the high E goes. We fixed it in about twenty minutes, no big deal, but it stuck with me because he'd tried to shortcut a hands-on problem with a video, and it just didn't translate. Strumming patterns are the same kind of thing. You can watch me do it a hundred times. It clicks when your own arm does it wrong forty times and then does it right once. That's the mechanics of it. Nobody skips that step, they just do the reps at different speeds.
A caution
Watch your wrist, not just your pick. If your wrist locks stiff and all the motion comes from your shoulder, you'll feel it after ten minutes, a tired, achy forearm. The motion should come loose from the wrist, pick barely angled into the strings. If your hand cramps up, stop, shake it out, start again. No reason to push through pain to prove a point.
My honest opinion here
I'd rather you nail pattern one slow and boring for a week than rush into three patterns you can't actually control. This is the same boring-foundational-stuff argument I make about everything. The apps that promise you'll strum along to a real song by Thursday are setting you up to sound bad and quit. Take the extra week. It's cheaper in the long run.
Before next time
Pick one pattern, pattern one if you're ready, pattern three if you're not, and run it against your Em-G-C-D loop for ten minutes a day. Same time each day if you can manage it. Tune first, every time, you know the drill by now.