Strumming Patterns - Lesson two
Exercise Six
Ok continuing from exercise five. This one introduces the concept of a half note in the middle of a bar. So you would play a quarter note on beat one, a half note on beat two, this rings through beat three followed by a quarter note on beat four. Once again I've used Em and Am, but feel free to use any chords you can play well and change between consistently. Don't forget:- if you cannot play this rhythm in time while you are changing chords then stay on the same chord until you can consistently play the rhythm, then start changing chord.
Ok on to Exercise Seven This exercise introduces eighth notes. These are played with an up strum which brushes the top two or three strings. This will give your rhythm playing a more dynamic and rhythmic feel than you would get if you did a full upstrum across all the strings for the chord. So to count this rhythm you would count one, two, three, four and or preferably, one and two and three and four and, although you would only play on the last and. Again, the important thing here is to be consistent with the rhythm the and of beat four should be twice as fast as beats one to three, check out the accompanying video for an example of this.
Now, this exercise gives you eighth notes on beat four [and]. If you think about this you'll realise that there is no reason why this couldn't be done on any beat. The next three exercises show this by moving the eighth notes nearer the beginning of the bar one beat at a time. Someone listening to you play these four exercises would struggle to hear any difference. It's only when you think about where the beginning of the bar is that they sound any different.
Now for Exercise Eight If you've worked through the four variations on exercise seven this should be fairly self explanatory, also you should be getting used to seeing the rhythms written down on paper. his exercise is simply quarter notes on beats one and two followed by eighth notes on beats three and four [and]. Following on the concept introduced in exercise 7 of effectively moving the beats along the bar you get to Exercise Nine
So for this exercise you have a quarter note on beat one, eighth notes on beats two and three [and] followed by another quarter note on beat four. Lastly this brings us to Exercise Ten
This one gives you a quarter note on beat one and the rest of the bar is all eighth notes. It's important now to get all these patterns down solidly before moving on as the rhythms become more complex and include different time signatures to worry about.
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