What's that strumming pattern?

[BobbyMocha]

Originally Posted by SteveBurt

I also struggled with strum patterns, and a guitar teacher who said 'just play what feels right'. Sorry, that's not helpful advice

Yeah that’s where my head is. I don’t know what “feel” is when it comes to learning what I’m guessing is a foundational skill. I can tap my foot in time with the beats and tap my finger on the upbeats so I can certainly feel the rhythm.

But as a new player whose leaning to play it, I need a little how and why to what I practice. If I understand the reason behind it. I can apply it to different songs or adapt it to new songs.

[mattbn73]

Originally Posted by mr. beaumont

Why don't we pick a real tune and go through it?

yeah. It's difficult to discuss a lot of this stuff in abstraction

Anyway, in my mind, the D-DU-U-DU type thing is just a beginning SHORTCUT and simple way to communicate basic feels in text or short YouTube video, but the shear number of YouTube videos with this kind of thing have led to a kind of misunderstanding that this is just THE way you learn rhythm on acoustic guitar. It doesn't actually teach you all the skills required though.

I never really taught them this way. didn't have Youtube, and I didn't know any better. Anyway, I always just taught fundamentals: basics of rhythm, good strumming technique, and how to apply different accent patterns to really basic strumming.

There are several steps, but at the basic level, it's answering a simple question: Can you strum basic changes using all DOWN-UP 8ths or 16ths in 4/4, depending on the feel of the song?

As beginners, most of us sound like absolute GARBAGE, playing all sixteenths or eighths. The typical response to this is that , of course, real players don't PLAY on every subdivision, which is certainly true most of the time. But that misses another important point entirely: that they basically CAN, if asked to. The "missing strums" beginner strum patterns are basically a WORKAROUND for the problem of bad right hand technique, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, as long as you understand that it's basically curing symptom and not the disease. You really don't have to have ANY technique at all to play these down up patterns which miss strings.

In my opinion, the "constant motion" idea discussed above is most easily learned by working more on a CONSTANT STRUMMING technique. It's easier to subtract from something concrete than from an abstraction or idea. You should also be able to basically imply accent patterns, even if you're strumming on every subdivision. Strumming with good technique and being able to strum louder or softer are essential techniques for playing generally.

Long-term, it's important to understand some basic ideas:
+ Most players don't play the same strum pattern for a whole tune, or even for a section. (Strum patterns convey or imply feels . They aren't THE feel in and of themselves necessarily. They're more the means than the end.)

+ Players generally play something different depending on whether they're playing alone, with bass, with bass and drums, with a larger group etc. (I'm not interested in playing exactly what the drummers are playing ever . I may as well not be there.)

+ At a certain level, you need to be able to play convincingly on tunes which have NO strum pattern at ALL on the original recording , maybe no guitar whatsoever.

+ At a certain point, you need to be able to play things with multiple different feels, different than you've ever heard for that song etc. It's cool to understand how music works, beyond having heard a specific song played a specific way necessarily.

In the end, you should be able to play something like The Weight with several different strum patterns, all of which imply the same original feel. Additionally, long term, you want to be able to change that feel entirely and have some kind of understanding of how that's done in the first place.