Day 15

What goes down, must come up.

If you remember, our annotation for strumming is currently
D D D D |D D D D |

And if there's no beat on a sttrum, your arm moves anyway.

Well, sometimes you play on the up strums too.

Keep doing your down strum steady beat from the other day.

When you strum down, your hand has to come up. If you strummed up on each of those strums, it comes out to

DUDUDUDU|DUDUDUDU

(Which, when read aloud, sort fo sounds like the inside of my brain right now)

The key to strum patterns is just to move just enough of those around so that you can keep the beat, but whoever's listening doesn't get bored,.

Remember to hear the beat in your head. Remember to keep the down strum on the beat.

Here's a couple to dip around with:

D DU UDU|D DU UDU
This one's my personal crutch for 4/4 time. The part where you skip playing the third downstroke makes it sound all cool and interesting, but it's easy to play and works for a lot of songs.

D DUDU|D DUDU
This one's for 3/4 time (I'll explain time signatures later because they're important but I really just want to go to sleep. The cheat version is to take the number of D strokes in a repeat and it's probably that number over 4)

D DUD DU|D DUD D
Here's another easy one for 4/4 time

DU UDU U|DU UDU U
This one's funky seeming until you play it, but it's bright and funky and Easy
And 4/4

Practice all of these (and then check some more out if you want). One of the secrets to not sounding boring when you strum is to master the thing where you don't always play the down stroke.

I'm so tired. Real post tomorrow about stuff and things.
Good night, and trust me, you're better than you think you are.