Top 5 Acoustic Strumming Patterns

In this tutorial, I will be introducing you to 5 fun and incredibly useful strumming patterns
that can be used in MANY musical situations (rock, blues, jazz, pop, country, etc) and can be
played on both acoustic and electric guitar.

When you begin learning to strum the guitar, its important to recognize how essential
rhythm is to your music. We often focus on chords, and forget that rhythm is what makes
the music sound musical.

In our first pattern, we will be looking at a basic downstrum pattern, and introduce an
upstrum to make the pattern more exciting, for both YOU and your LISTENER:

PATTERN 1

Pattern 1 is an excellent pattern to get in the swing of playing the vital upstrum.

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 In pattern 2, we will add more upstrums to make the patterns flow more elegant and
give the impression of a faster pace:

PATTERN 2

Notice the similarity between the first part of the strum and the second? The Down Down
Down/Up is the same, but because there is an extra down on beat 3, it throws the
pattern onto different beats, which makes it more interesting.

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 In pattern 3, we see our first introduction of skipping a downstrum (we dont play on beat
2, instead, we hold the strum). This makes for a bit more funky sound in your strum,
and makes the strum sound less standard. This strum is often called the Eagles strum
because if its common use by the band, The Eagles, but occurs in many songs by many
artists:

PATTERN 3

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 In pattern 4, we will be looking at pulling even more downstrums out of the pattern,
which creates a bit more reggae or ska feel in your strumming pattern. This is an
awesome strum to use for artists such as Bob Marley, and any slow songs that require
more space to make them breathe:

PATTERN 4

Often, we will see guitar players actually stop the strings on the beats in between the
upstrums to get a more percussive sound in their rhythm. This is not necessary, but its
worth trying out!

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 And finally, we move to another essential pattern, as we see in pattern 5:

PATTERN 5

This pattern brings together ALL the elements from the other 4 patterns, and gives us a
fast and fun style strumming pattern. This can be used when you want to drive your song
and give it some aggression, or to make the song seem to run as opposed to walk. This
pattern has a lot of variety of down and up strums, but also incorporates the reggae
element of skipping the downstrum on beats 3 and 4.

With these essential 5 strumming patterns, you should be able to choose the best one for
any of your writing or performing needs!

Good luck!

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