Strumming Mastery

Posted under Guitar Lessons by Spencer

Do you want to learn a really quick technique for improving your strumming skills? Then read on…

This is a simple exercise that I teach my beginner students just after they’ve started to master chords and are able to strum cleanly to a regular beat.

Usually after this they struggle to do advanced strumming patterns and I think its down to the neural pathways controlling the up and down movement being
set strongly (after lots of practice) and breaking that pattern is quite hard.

What you do is strum down and then touch your knee with your strumming hand.
Then you strum up and touch your nose.
Down - knee
Up - nose.

You repeat this for about a minute - trying to get faster and faster as you go.

Now try and do a more complex strumming pattern like down, down, down-up-down…

If you’re just reading this go ahead and give it a try.

The reason this works - I think - is that the touching knee and nose changes the neural pathways associated with the up-down strumming movement, and the brain
realises that its possible to find a gap in between each one. This gap is big enough to make a change to the strumming pattern, a gap which was not there before.
In psychology terms this is a pattern interrupt and it is just one of the many ways I’ve found to quickly fix problems that are included in “Beyond Bedroom Guitar”

Its subtle but it seems to work with every student I’ve tried it with so go on give it a go.

Kind regards, Spencer.