Home | Music & Dance | Instruments | How to Play the Guitar - Blues Song

Guitar - Strum Patterns for a Blues Song

Currently 0.0/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

To properly view this site, javascript must be enabled and Flash version 9 or higher must be installed.
Get the latest Flash player

View All Videos In This Series

Hi! I am Franklin Taggart. I am a guitar teacher and a guitar player. I would like to show you how to develop a strum pattern for the guitar. The key to making a strum pattern work is to keep your hand moving in a uniform motion, down, up, down, up down, up, down, up, down and your motion is going to be with the rhythm of the song you want to play on the guitar.

So, your hands always going to go down on the rhythm that you count, so if you've got four beats in a measure, you count four; one, two, three, four. Naturally if you are going down on the beat, your hand comes up in between, and so when you are strumming, what happens is, you are going to be primarily doing all down strokes with your right hand.

For the blues song that we want to learn on the guitar, you are going to be learning a slightly different pattern and the way that it works as you are going to go down twice and then you are going to go down up down at the end of that.

So, here's how it works. You are going to go down, down, down, up down, down, down, down, up down, down, down, down, up down, down, down, down, up down. When you are learning a strum pattern it's helpful to say out loud the direction that you want your hand to move. Your hand will follow that direction very easily.

It's the easiest way to learn a strum pattern and then memorize it is to say out loud what you are playing. So, that's the strum pattern that we are going to be using on the guitar for the Blues song that we learned today.

Thanks so much.

Expert: Franklin Taggart

http://franklintaggart.com

Email: FranklinTaggart@aol.com

Franklin Taggart is a guitarist, singer/songwriter, recording engineer and record producer based in Silver Spring, MD. He's played guitar since 1975 and has been involved in some aspect of performing, recording and composing ever since then. He also is a well known guitar teacher in the Washington, DC area. He has been nominated for many WAMMIE awards from the Washington Area Music Association, winning the More »