3 Beginner Strumming Patterns You NEED To Know!

When you’re first getting started playing guitar these 3 essential strumming patterns will help you become confident with simple chord progressions. In this beginner guitar lesson we’ll break down three essential strumming patterns that every guitarist should be able to play as well as general tips like how to strum a guitar, changing chords while keeping the strumming going and some tricks to improve your rhythm.

The lesson begins with the easiest strumming pattern you can play on guitar. But before we even try to learn the pattern, we need to figure out some mechanics of strumming, some basic counting and rhythm stuff, how to move your arm, how to strum the guitar… Basically, we’re turning our arm into a living metronome so that we can keep a super steady beat.

Once you figure out the mechanics of strumming, learning patterns is really easy. I even share some tips and tricks that’ll let you play along to real songs right away even, if you don’t know the chords, and learn to feel the groove. It’s kind of like being a drummer but with your guitar. These are the things that will make you an above and beyond musician faster than you thought possible.

Once we tackle those essentials of rhythm and strumming, the first pattern is incredibly easy. We break it down, count it out and then play it together a few times.

The second strumming pattern that we go over is the most common strumming pattern ever. It contains a missing beat – what we would call syncopation. This makes it a little trickier to feel but is one of those speed bumps that, once you overcome, your rhythm will hit the next level.

We break it down, we count it out and we go over my step by step strategy for developing your rhythm and learning strumming patterns. We attack it from multiple angles so no matter what your level and no matter what you how you feel about strumming, you will learn how to play it.

After breaking it down in every way possible, we put the strumming pattern back together and play it a little bit before moving on to the next one, which is one of the most useful strumming patterns ever. It is that classic rock and roll beat in strumming pattern form! “boom, Chuck, boom, boom Chuck” (just reading those words, you probably know which one I’m talking about!)

We learn how to play it using a root strum to add dynamics to our strumming, we break it down and then we put it together. The cool thing with strumming patterns is they share a lot of the same components. So once you learn a few it’ll be really easy to learn more and more, and these three are the foundation of practically every strumming pattern, so investing the time in them and learning them like the back of your hand is going to make everything else so much simpler!

We conclude the lesson by playing these strumming patterns with a metronome because a metronome is like a rhythm master. It’s like a player who plays so precisely and it is a privilege to play with “someone” who has such good rhythm. So, we are going to take advantage of that and learn how to play our strumming patterns with the metronome. We do it for each and every one covered in this lesson. And that’s that!

If you want a printable pdf with everything we cover in this lesson, you’ll find it in my free eBook: https://goodguitarist.com/learn-rhyth…

Enjoy!
-James