Heartwood Guitar Instruction

I teach kids as young as three years old to play guitar. One of the keys to teaching really little kids, besides knowing how to spontaneously burp, wiggle your ears, and listen to that orange/banana knock-knock joke 3,000 times without going AWOL, is choosing the right material.

Kids this young can barely pick their own nose, so there’s no way I’m going to try to get them to fret chords. Instead, I teach them a lot of melodies and bass lines on either the first or sixth strings (the easiest ones to pick).

By the way, I have lots more ideas for teaching kids guitar in my handbook for guitar teachers.

Riffs and Melodies On One String

Smoke on the Water
Deep Purple
“Smoke on the Water” is God’s gift to guitar teachers. I believe it’s listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as The Easiest Cool Riff Ever. Normally played on the 3rd and 4th strings, I transposed to the 6th string to make it easier.

The “Riffs and Melodies On One String” are all available in one Guitar Pro file here. Don’t have Guitar Pro yet? Learn more.

Mary Had a Little Lamb
I promised myself I’d never teach this song, until I was in a pinch during a lesson with a 5-year-old and played this for her. Her look of delight at recognizing the melody cured me of any prejudice I had against this cute children’s song.

Louie, Louie
The Kingsmen
If a child’s dying to learn a particular song, I’ll often figure out a way to play the bass line to the song on the 6th string of the guitar. Here’s “Louie, Louie,” still recognizable because of its distinctive rhythm.

For What it’s Worth
Buffalo Springfield
This is my all-time favorite beginner’s song. The whole thing can be played with just two chords, E and A, if you skip the C and D in the chorus. I have kids learn both the bass line for the song, simply playing quarter notes, and a fretted version of the harmonics that are played during the intro. Once they learn harmonics, they can play the real thing (12th fret harmonic, then 7th fret harmonic).

What’s really cool is when I get a couple kids to play the part together. Here’s a video of Emma, Axel, and Conner rocking out with me and some other students at one of the Coffee Shop Jams. Just wish their guitars were turned up higher…grr…

Songs With Simplified Bass Lines

If a child (or a total-beginner adult) wants to sing and play at the same time, I distill songs to their most simple form: Their bass line, played on the 6th string. Any song can be simplified this way. You just have the guitarist play the root note of each chord in a steady rhythm (usually quarter notes or eighth notes). Music is easier to read if you identify the 6th string fret number instead of the note name (A, B, C#, etc.)

Note that several of my young students have…shall we say…non-standard tastes. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend some of these songs to kids, but if they request them, here they are.

Bush – Glycerine
Cake – Love You Madly
Johnny Cash – Wide Open Road
Bob Dylan – I Threw It All Away
Robbie Fulks – Godfrey
Green Day – Good Riddance
Green Day – Holiday
Merle Haggard – Mama Tried
Lady Gaga – Paparazzi
Iggy Pop – The Passenger
Bruce Springsteen – Chicken Lips and Lizard Hips
Neil Young – Needle and the Damage Done

Strumming Songs

Once kids learn how to arch their fingers and gain some strength and coordination, they graduate to playing chords using my finest invention: The String Mute 4000. This state-of-the-art device employs military-grade hook-and-loop adhesive to minimize sonic vibritization.

Yep, it’s just a little square of Velcro, cut from a long strip I bought at a craft store. The “hook” side had an adhesive backing, which was a bummer until I realized I could stick my business card on it.

The String Mute 4000, in all its glory

Rip the velcro apart, and slide one half under the 4th, 5th, and 6th strings at around the 9th fret, being careful not to touch the 3rd string. Sandwich the other half on top. Now you can play a one-finger G (1st string, 3rd fret), G7 (1st string, 1st fret), and C (2nd string, 1st fret).

Get that edge lined up between the 3rd and 4th strings. Kids will need help with this.

Here are two great one-chord songs that kids can sing while strumming a G chord using the string mute. Just Google ‘em to find the lyrics:

Are You Sleeping, Brother John?
Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Here’s a song from Peter Pan that sounds lovely sung over the C chord:

Tender Shepherd

And once they get good at these 1-chord songs, they can graduate to some songs that just use C and G7:

Ain’t No Bugs On Me
The Hokey Pokey
My Darling Clementine
London Bridges
Buffalo Gals

OK, those songs should get ‘em rolling! Remember that young kids have the attention span of hummingbirds, so if you’ve gotten them to focus on a song for at least two minutes, you’ve hit a home run.

Welcome to Chef Hampton’s All-You-Can-Stand Improvisational Guitar Buffet. Our first course is boiled spinich–a bland, soggy scale exercise that is nonetheless packed with vitamins and minerals. Fortified with clear diagrams and video clips, this meal is an important part of a beginning guitarist’s diet. Bon Appetit!

In Improvising 101, the appetizer to today’s meal, I introduced the A minor pentatonic scale, which, despite its complicated-sounding name, is the simplest scale for budding improvisers to learn and use. You may want to give it a taste before continuing, because the next course is going to be…how should I put it…a character-building experience for your taste buds.

I’m talking about repetitious practicing–in this case, playing the A minor pentatonic scale up and down, up and down, for a good while. There’s no way to avoid this kind of repetition if you want to learn to improvise with spontaneity and grace. In fact, practicing scales is part of the Improvisational Guitarist’s Nutrition Pyramid ™:

As you can see, foolin’ around is the foundation of an improviser’s practice routine. Foolin’ around includes using your intuition, experimenting, doing it the wrong way. Play Mary Had a Little Lamb backwards. String your guitar with dental floss. You’ll be participating in a time-honored tradition of tinkerers and tweakers, from Leo Fender to Leo Kottke.

Learning other people’s licks is also important. While great artists strive to go beyond imitation, they always draw inspiration from their predecessors. When you listen to a great guitarist improvising, what you’re hearing the sum of all the music they’ve learned before, spiced with their own creative genius.

But repetitious scale practice is an important part of your diet too. So let’s dig in. To start with, here are a couple of ways of looking at the scale pattern we’re using–first a diagram, and then with tablature:

Above is a diagram of a four-fret section of your fretboard. The horizontal lines are the guitar strings, with the high E string at the top and the low E string at the bottom, and the vertical lines are the fret wires. Each dot is a note in the scale pattern, and the number tells you which finger to use. Those orange circles are “A” notes, which are the “root” notes of the Am Pentatonic Scale. We’ll talk more about root notes some other time.

You might be wondering where this scale is supposed to be played. We’re going to play in 5th position, meaning that the first finger is going to hang out on the 5th fret, but this pattern can be played anywhere up and down the neck. Move the hand up the neck, and you’re playing in a higher key. Move it down the neck, and you’re playing in a lower key. Scratch under your armpit and make hooting noises, and you’re a mon key.

Back to the scale. Here’s the tablature version of the scale pattern:

Let’s memorize this scale pattern. It’s easy, because with this pattern, there are just two notes per string, and one of those notes is on the 5th fret. The other note is either played with your pinkie (on the 8th fret) or with your ring finger (on the 7th fret). Let’s call strings with notes on the 5th and 8th frets pinkie strings, and strings with notes of 5th and 7th frets ring finger strings.

Memorize this: The 6th, 2nd, and 1st strings are pinkie strings. All others are ring finger strings.

Got that memorized? OK, we’re almost ready to play the scale. But first, the Six Scale Practice Commandments. It’s really, really important that you practice this scale using proper technique:

• Thou shalt avoid mistakes by playing slowly
• Thou shalt place thy thumb behind the neck so that thy fingers may part like the Red Sea
• Each note shalt sound good
• Thou shalt play in rhythm
• Thou shalt use alternate picking (alternating downstrokes and upstrokes)
• Thou shalt not sound choppy, but with one note flowing into the next

Now watch a video of me playing the Am Pentatonic scale using impeccable technique. New Orleans, here I come!

Now it’s your turn. I recommend practicing this in four five-minute intervals, with a brief break in between. You want to stay focused as you practice, and after five minutes people’s minds tend to wander. With this practice schedule, in a week you’ll be smoooove.

I can’t stress enough how important it is for you to get off on the right foot and follow the Six Commandments. Just look what happened to Larry Underwood of Fremont, CA. Larry rushed when practicing his scales. Now he plays Barney the Dinosaur covers for bored kindergartners:

When I propose to my beginner students that they try out improvising, most give me a funny look. It’s something like, “You’ve got to be kidding me, I can’t even play for more than a minute without dropping my pick in the soundhole.” I’d like to say it’s a “Master Yoda, I am not yet prepared to face Lord Vader” look, but I drop my own pick in the soundhole often enough to dispel any illusions of Jedi powers. I can’t even get my girlfriend’s dogs to sit.

Even so, I’m a decent improviser. You can be too. It takes years to sound really good, but you can sound pretty good right away. Let’s go!

Grab your guitar and play these three notes (click here if you need help reading tablature). Play the note on the 5th fret with your first (index) finger, and the notes on the 8th fret with your fourth (wimpy) finger:

If you’ve seen Ray, the movie that came out recently about Ray Charles, these notes might ring a bell. There’s this scene where a young Ray wanders in to a bar to listen to an old man playing the piano. The old man sits him down and shows him three notes, and then they jam. We’re going to do the same thing. (I realize doing this over the internet is an extremely non-blues thing to do, but you can make up for it by calling your boss and telling him/her you quit. There. Now you have the blues.)

Before we jam, practice playing these three notes by repeating this pattern about ten times:

Now download my 12 Bar Blues in A Jam Track. It’s a recording of 12-bar blues, a common chord progression used in blues songs.

Once you’ve got the jam track playing, start playing those three notes, in any order you like, along with the music. Don’t worry about sounding good, focus on playing in rhythm with the music. You could try playing a note every time you hear the guitar strummed, or play a note every time the strumming pattern repeats. Or your could stand on your head and cluck like a chicken. There are no rules!

Here are two guidelines for making your improvisation sound even better than it does now:

• Vary your rhythm Sometimes play fast, sometimes let a note ring for a while.
• Vary your volume Let some notes whisper and other notes scream.

Incidentally, those three notes the old man taught to Ray, and I taught to you, belong to the A minor pentatonic scale. That means it’s in the key of “A,” it’s got a special “minor” note in it that makes the scale sound sad, and it’s a five-note scale. “Penta” means five, as in The Pentagram, where the U.S. Department of Defense is. What’s that? It’s called the Pentagon? Oh yeah, I always get my symbols of evil mixed up.

I chose to teach you how to improvise using this scale because no matter what note you hit, it sounds good. If you hit a note that matches the rhythm guitar chord, great. If you hit a note that clashes, it just sounds like you’ve REALLY got the blues. Just make your best blues face…

…and keep playing!

Here are all the notes of the A minor pentatonic scale found on the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th frets. You’ll notice there are a lot more than five notes. It’s because they repeat in higher octaves. If this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry about it right now.

Try adding a few more nearby notes from this scale to the notes you already know, and play with the Jam Track some more. Keep adding notes until you’re using all the notes in the pattern.

Sooner or later, you’re going to want to learn some licks, which are tried-and-true little sequences of notes that you can memorize and weave into your improvising. I’ll share some of my favorites with you soon.

Have fun!

What’s the hardest thing about playing guitar? Sore fingers? Sore neighbors?

I’d say the hardest part is hitting the correct string when playing single notes. Consider the rock star up there on stage. He’s singing into the mic, so he can’t peek at his guitar. Even if he could, his goldilocks are in his eyes, the lights are in his eyes, and the smoke machine has engulfed the whole stage in a whiteout. As the rock star finishes howling the chorus, his picking hand, a lost pilot in a storm cloud, cuts through the mist toward the B string for the first note of the guitar solo. It has no runway lights to guide it, no GPS, no control tower–only its arm which rests on the top of the guitar more than a foot away. How can the pick possibly connect with the B string, with room for error of just one centimeter, when its point of reference is so remote? Mayday! Mayday!

There’s no simple solution. Instead, there are all manners of shenanigans guitarists employ to keep their picking hand from getting lost. And as Chekov wrote, “If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.” So strap on your parachutes flyboys and flygirls!

For Further Study

Here’s an excellent video by Eric Skye, a guitarist who I met on Acoustic Guitar Forum, demonstrating good picking technique. He shows you brushing techniques at 1:50.

After all, this is a WAR, people! One wrong note, and…

“Hey Zeus, check out this cool riff I learned!”

A couple days ago a Notebook reader was telling me how much she was enjoying learning “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd, and asked me if there were some similar songs I could recommend.

“Wish You Were Here” is such a great song for beginning and intermediate guitar players. Usually, gorgeous guitar songs are out of a beginner’s reach–a student will often ask me to teach them a song by a guitar god like Jimi Hendrix, John Mayer, Suzanne Vega, or Dave Matthews, and I have to either simplify the song until it’s barely recognizable, or tell the student to wait (which throws my little teacher’s heart into spasms).

But every once in a while, the guitar gods hand us a gift–a song that’s both beautiful and easy to play.

Here’s a list of Gifts From the Guitar Gods, starting with the easiest songs I know for total beginners, and ending with some divine intermediate songs for mortal fingers. Most titles are linked to chord charts I’ve written for my students. For the songs that involve more than simple strumming, I recommend searching for “tabs” or “tablature” on the internet, or using PowerTab Editor.

Gifts for Total Beginners

These are the most common songs and riffs I use in the first few lessons with my beginner students.

For What it’s Worth – Buffalo Springfield – No one knows the name of this song, but most adults recognize it by ear. It can be played with just two chords (E and A) if you simplify the chorus. It’s the easiest guitar song I know, and it sounds great when I play the electric guitar riff over it. Use the folk strum.

Eleanor Rigby – Beatles – My guitar arrangement of this song has just two chords during the verses (Em and C), and a very cool-sounding voice leading part in the chorus (Em7, Em6, C, Em). I teach it using the folk strum or 8th note downstrums. With really young kids–5 through 8 years old–I mute the three bass strings with a piece of felt. Then they can play the whole song using just one finger on the second string: 3rd fret for Em7, 2nd for Em6, 1st for C, and open for Em. When I play along to fill in the bass notes, it sounds great.

Good Riddance – Green Day – Most of my younger students are into the pop-punk bands like Blink 182, Bowling for Soup, Sum 41, All American Rejects, Good Charlotte, and of course, Green Day. Unfortunately, most require power chords, which are easy to play after a few months of practice, but what do you do in the mean time? Most easy songs sound like Mary Had a Little Lamb to these kids’ ears. Thank goodness for Good Riddance–a four-chord acoustic song that, when slowed down and strummed using the folk strum, is easy but still rocks

Smoke on the Water – Deep Purple – Young students are often best introduced to the guitar with single-note riffs or licks instead of chords. The Smoke on the Water riff, played in “E” on the 6th string, is super-easy and sounds cool. If students want to learn the whole song, I re-tune them to drop-D and have them play power chords on the 6th and 5th strings.

The First Cut is the Deepest – Sheryl Crow – Just four easy chords. Listen to little Helena Klein, just 7 years old at the time this was filmed, sing this at one of my Coffee Shop Jams.

Be Here to Love Me – Norah Jones – Not a very well-known song, but if you love Norah, you’ll love this one. Four easy chords.

Come as You Are – Nirvana – If you strum this song in Em (using, you guessed it, the folk strum pattern), it’s just four easy chords. Another favorite first song for beginning rockers.

Wasting Time – Jack Johnson – A simple bass-strum song by a pro-surfer-turned-moviemaker-turned-musician. It’s nice and slow but my students always rush it. I’ve found that imagining you’re sitting under a palm tree on Maui helps to keep the tempo down.

Gifts for Intermediate Players

Wish You Were Here – Pink Floyd – The intro to this song is made easier by a technique used in many sounds-hard-but-isn’t songs. The third and fourth fingers are parked on the second and first strings, third fret, creating a G chord if you strum the 1st through 4th strings. The first and second fingers cruise around the bass strings, changing the bass notes from G to A to C to B, to create different variations on the G chord. I call these songs G-whiz songs, as in, “G-whiz, I can actually play this!”

Closer to Fine – Indigo Girls – Another G-whiz song, and a campfire favorite.

Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town – Pearl Jam – Yet another G-whiz song. Easier to play than it is to say!

All I Want is You – U2 – G-whiz, another one?! You could spend your whole career playing guitar in the key of G and never get bored….

Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Green Day – Once my Green-Day-obsessed students learn Good Riddance, they often graduate to this song. All the chords are easy except for the B chord, which I have them play as a power chord at the 7th fret, 6th and 5th strings. They usually
have to slow down for that one chord, but it’s a small price to pay for being able to rock like Billy Joe Armstrong!

Building a Mystery (live acoustic version) – Sarah McLachlan – The guitar part is kind of complicated, with little embellishments at every turn, but they’re all nice and ergonomic–no big stretches or difficult picking.

Cannonball – Damien Rice – One of my recent discoveries, Cannonball is a great two-guitar song, with a G-whiz rhythm guitar part and an easy-but-hard-sounding lead riff.

Over the Hills and Far Away – Led Zeppelin – This is a challenging song for a beginning or intermediate guitarist–it’s fast and furious the whole way through–but Jimmy Page divides the work between the left and right hands through liberal use of hammer-ons and pull-offs. I learned this song in high school, and got by for the next ten years having terrible right hand technique–I just hammered-on and pulled-off every note that was too fast to pick. Just think of what you can do if you learn this song AND practice scales every once in a while!

Stairway to Heaven – Led Zeppelin – I’ll never forget my buddy Paul McCann telling me “You gotta hear this song by this band Led Zeppelin! It’s like eight minutes long and it starts off all slow and then it starts rockin’ and I think it’s about suicide!” Since then, I’ve heard Stairway to Heaven approximately 7 gazillion times, and I still like playing it. The intro/verse progression is lovely, and it’s easy to fret and pick.

I hope you have fun with these Gifts From the Guitar Gods. What’s that? You were hoping for a ’58 Gibson Les Paul? Sheesh….

Today I’m going to expose what I consider the most pervasive and insidious bit of misinformation plaguing modern society. No, it’s not that Columbus didn’t discover America. It doesn’t have anything to do with racism, the environment, or politics.

It’s about thumb placement. That’s right folks, Thumb, with a capitol T, that rhymes with C, that stands for CONSPIRACY!

Open Hal Leonard Guitar Method Book 1, a popular starter book for acoustic and electric guitar players, to page 4, and you’ll read:

Place the thumb in back of the neck roughly opposite the 2nd finger. Avoid gripping the neck like a baseball bat with the palm touching the back of the neck.

Now consider these photos of Eric Clapton and BB King:

Eric and BB are two of my most promising students, but it can be SO frustrating sometimes. Look at those thumbs! I keep referring them back to Hal Leonard Guitar Method Book 1, but they never seem to learn.

Seriously, it’s not just Hal Leonard that teaches students to keep the thumb behind the neck–all classical guitar instruction books, and many folk/rock books teach this. With a few exceptions, classical guitar is best played with the thumb behind the neck, so I have no problem with Andres Segovia and Co. But in the world of acoustic and electric guitars, these books are out of touch with reality. Don’t their authors see live music? Maybe they’re too busy answering emails from confused and frustrated readers.

The truth is, sometimes you put your thumb behind the neck, and sometimes you use the “baseball bat” grip. Here are some guidelines for thumb placement:

Thumb Behind Neck

How to

Put your thumb on the back of the neck at the fattest part, roughly behind the fret where the second finger is.

When to

• Playing most classical music – Having the thumb behind the neck enables you to really arch your fingers, which is necessary when playing on classical guitars, which have higher action than acoustics and electrics. Also, usually you’re fingerpicking, so there’s no need to use the thumb for muting the 6th string (explained below).
• Playing barre chords – These require a lot of pressure, so you want the thumb and fingers to act like a clamp.
• Spreading your fingers – It’s impossible to spread them otherwise. Check out Eddie, his thumb squarely behind the neck, his fingers spanning five frets:

(Incidentally, Mr. Van Halen’s expression should not be confused with the “Blues Face” on Mr. King and Mr. Clapton above. Mr. Van Halen is exhibiting a similar expression known as the “I should never have switched hairdressers” face.)

Baseball Bat Grip

How to

Cradle the neck in the skin between the thumb and forefinger or in the entire palm of your hand, depending on what you’re playing

When to

• When you need to mute the 6th string with your thumb – Many open chords (most variations of A, C, and D’s, for example) sound best if you don’t play the 6th string. Often, guitar instruction books recommend that you avoid the 6th string when you strum these chords, which is almost impossible and usually ends up sounding wimpy anyway. How are you going to do a Pete Townsend windmill if you’re trying to miss one of the strings?
• When you’re bending strings – You get better leverage.
• When you don’t need your thumb somewhere else – The baseball grip is simply more comfortable because you don’t have to bend your wrist as much.
• When you’re using your guitar as a baseball bat—The baseball bat grip is firmer than the thumb-behind-neck grip, and as every guitar player knows, if you throw your guitar, intentionally or unintentionally, you’re “out.”

Sincerely,

Arthur Fonzerelli
Chairman
Department of Thumb Placement Correction

This Tutorial Will Teach You To Strum in 20 Minutes

When I was a teenager teaching myself guitar in the 1980′s, the web didn’t exist. Googling wasn’t something you did on the computer—you did it with your eyes, at the girl who sat across from you in Chemistry. So when I had a question about guitar technique, I had to ask a friend who played guitar, research my mom’s ancient guitar instruction book, or sift through my guitar magazines to try to find the answer.

Now the internet is my primary guitar teacher. Whenever I have a question, the first place I go is a search engine. I find online videos, download free tabs, improvise over streaming jam tracks, and preview new music on iTunes.

The internet is especially great for an advanced guitarist. But one thing that’s often left out of free guitar lesson websites is proper instruction on strumming, even though this is the first hurdle most beginners face: Strumming a song start to finish.

One reason for this may be that it’s easier to learn strumming face-to-face with a teacher. Many students can simply watch and listen while a teacher strums, and pick up on the groove by imitating. But strumming can be described in writing. Over the eight years I’ve been teaching guitar, I’ve developed a system of writing strum patterns that anyone can learn to read easily, even if they’ve never had previous musical training.

If you enjoy this tutorial, I recommend signing up for my strum pattern videos. They’ll give you access to 155 high-quality videos (much better than the ones in this tutorial) that will show you how to strum most of the songs on my site.

Pickin’ the Pick

Unless you’re into old-time country or folk music, you’ll probably want to strum with a pick. Sometimes you’ll hear contemporary artists like John Mayer and Jack Johnson strum with their fingers if they want to alternate between strumming and fingerpicking, or if they want the muted, warm sound of fingers brushing strings. But 99% of acoustic guitar strummers like the crisp, bright sound of a pick.

Picks come in different shapes and thicknesses. Start with the normal shape:

Buy some thin- and medium- thickness picks. The thin ones are easier to use, but many guitarists don’t like their loud attack (the click of the pick hitting the strings). You can switch to mediums once you’ve learned the basics.

Heavy picks are for high-speed-guitar-solo types, so steer clear for now.

Holdin’ the Pick

Up until a few years ago, I held my pick between my thumb and the pads of my index and middle fingertips. It seemed the easiest way to keep the pick from falling out of my hand when I was strumming U2′s “Desire” and The Who’s “Pinball Wizard”. A few guitarists like Steve Howe hold their picks like that, but most hold it like this, with the pick between the thumb and the side of the index finger:

I think this grip gives you more control when you’re trying to pick individual strings. Since many songs require both picking and strumming, learn this first. If you want to switch to the Steve Howe grip later for strumming-only songs, go for it.

Guitar instruction books often show the pick being gripped with fingers curled into a tighter fist than in the photo above. But when I curl my fingers tighter, with the last joint of the index finger parallel with the thumb, it’s hard to let the pick flex in my fingers. It’s hard to strum lightly, and I drop my pick a lot. So one adjustment I’ve made is to extend my index finger a bit down the length of the pick like so:

See how my index finger is pointing less toward my palm and more toward you? This grip gives me more skin in contact with the pick for a more solid, but more gentle grip. I can let the pick flex in my fingers as I strum without dropping it. It also means that I sometimes hit the strings with the side of my index fingernail, and so the nail never grows out on that side. I still have enough nail for fingerpicking, but it’s ruined my career as a hand model on the Home Shopping Network. Darn!

Strummin’ With the Pick

The main thing you need to remember here is to keep your strumming arm going in a constant up-down motion, whether or not you’re hitting the strings. This acts as a metronome, helping you to stay in the groove of the song.

Exercise 1 (see video)

Let’s practice that principle by strumming all downstrokes, one strum per beat. But before we start, let’s take a look at how I write strum patterns:

D   D   D   D
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +

The lower line is the beats (the numbers) of the measure with the upbeats (the plus signs) in between. The upper line shows where you strum–D’s are downstrums, and U’s are upstrums. As you strum, you can count along by saying “one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and.” Move your arm down on the numbers and up on the “and’s”. In this first exercise, strum the strings on all downstrokes. When you get to the end of the measure (four beats), start over immediately. Go for it!

Exercise 2 (see video)

Now let’s try all down and upstrokes:

D U D U D U D U
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +

Here are some things to keep in mind:

• Strum from the elbow. Your wrist should be relaxed, but not moving very much. Most of the strumming motion comes from flexing your elbow.
• Keep the pick perpendicular to the strings. Often beginners will tilt the pick up on downstrokes and down on upstrokes so that the pick doesn’t get “caught” on the strings. The problem is, all that tilting is impossible once you start strumming more quickly, and can produce an uneven sound. Learning how to strum evenly takes time, but you can help things by gripping the pick lightly.
• Strum with a wide arc. Beginners tend to just barely pass over the strings as they strum. This can cause the strumming to sound choppy, where you can hear individual strings being struck. Instead, you want to hear all the strings being struck almost simultaneously, in a burst of sound. Strumming in a wide arc will increase the speed that your pick passes over the strings. It’s also harder to aim properly when you do this, but you’ll get it!

If you’re digging this tutorial, you’ll love my strum pattern videos. Just $7/month will give you access to 155 high-quality videos (much better than the ones in this tutorial) that will show you how to strum most of the songs on my site.

Exercise 3 (see video)

Next I want you to practice using your arm as a metronome, keeping it moving up and down even when you’re not strumming. Here’s the pattern:

D
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +

If this were really a guitar part in a song played by an experience guitarist, he or she probably wouldn’t be moving their arm that much–it does look a bit silly–but they would almost certainly be doing something with their body to keep in rhythm: Tapping their foot, bobbing their head, doing the Elvis knee-jerk, whatever.

Exercise 4 (see video)

Now you’re strumming twice per measure. Keep that arm moving!

D       D
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +

Exercise 5 (see video)

OK, here’s the first part of the folk strum pattern. Can’t you
feel the excitement mounting?

D   D U
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +

In this video I introduce a new way of using your voice to help you strum. So far we’ve been counting “one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and.” But as strum patterns get more complex, I find it’s easier to say the “down’s” and “up’s” as you’re strumming them. This one isn’t that hard, but the next one is….

Exercise 6 (see video)

This pattern is the most syncopated one so far. Syncopated music stresses upbeats, and this pattern has two upstrums in a row. Syncopated music is hard to play, but without it, funk granddaddy George Clinton would have been a tuba player in a polka band.

D   D U   U
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +

You’ll notice that I say “rest” on the 4th beat. I find this helps to remind you that you need to move your arm down on the 4th beat (even though you’re not strumming).

Exercise 7 (see video)

Here it is, the holy grail of beginning strumming, the Folk Strum Pattern:

D   D U   U D U
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +

The other patterns in these exercises were merely warm-ups. The Folk Strum Pattern, on the other hand, is used in a ton of songs, so keep working on it until you can play it in your sleep. Try it with Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” or if you want something less folksy, how about Nirvana’s “Come as You Are?”

(See video of me doing my best Kurt Cobain).

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Did I mention that my strum pattern videos are a great next step in your strumming education? They’ll show you how to strum most of the songs on my site, using high-quality videos like the Folk Strum video you watched.

Let me know how you liked the lesson and please tell me if anything wasn’t clear.

What’s the use of practicing guitar if you’re headed toward burnout? Whenever you’re working on something–a song, as skill, and exercise–you should be listening to your gut, asking yourself if what you’re doing is inspiring you.

I mention this because in yesterday’s post How To Practice, I listed some principles for practicing that some of you might consider a bit anal (as the psychotherapists put it). We guitarists are generally more laid-back than your average, say, oboe player. We like to break the rules, make weird noises, and occasionally smash our instruments for thousands of screaming fans. (Maybe oboe players would smash their instruments too if it didn’t look so silly, I don’t know.)

So whenever I teach a finger exercise or use the metronome with my students, I tell them that they shouldn’t use it if it’s making them reach for the lighter fluid (you young folks may not be aware of the famous story of Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire). The most important thing you can do to get better at the guitar is to practice a lot, so whatever you’re doing needs to keep you motivated.

For example, I learned the principles in How to Practice when my guitar teacher Jay taught me a highly structured practice routine that was too rigid for my tastes. It involved using an egg timer and practicing in 5-minute intervals, counting correct repetitions, and starting over when a mistake is made. It was cool to try out, but eventually the egg timer got on my nerves. That’s when I knew that I needed to adapt the technique to match my personality. Now I still try to avoid mistakes, but there’s no egg timer, and no counting. I repeat a passage until I think I’ve got it. And I’m loving it the whole time.

One of my hopes for this notebook is to collect lesson ideas. Here is my first entry along that line.

When you practice a difficult piece of music, do you repeat the whole thing again and again, stumbling the whole way through, until the music eventually surfaces from under the mess of wrong notes, halting rhythm, and curses? That’s how I used to practice.

I started playing guitar when I was in the seventh grade, learning mostly from my friends Justin, a Jimmy Buffet fanatic, and Matt, a hair band shredder. While it was a varied education, one thing I didn’t learn was how to practice. I would attempt long passages of music—like Jimi Hendrix’s Castles Made of Sand—at top speed, again and again. I thought that was how everyone did it. The approach went something like this: make 50 mistakes on my first try, 48 on my second, 47 on my third, and in another decade, I’ll be able to play the whole thing with no mistakes! Now how the heck do I sing along?

The process was so slow and frustrating, I’m surprised I stuck with it at all. And I never did get Castles down.

Over the years, I got rid of a lot of those bad habits, but things really came together for me during lessons with Jay Roberts a few years ago. Here are the principles I distilled from those lessons:

• We Repeat Musical Phrases to Build Muscle Memory Muscle memory is a mental record of repeated movements that enable us to move with no thought. When Hendrix sings “Castles Made of Sand” while playing all those gorgeous embellishments on his guitar, he’s not thinking much about his playing—his fingers just remember what they’ve played before. Most of his thought is probably going to singing, making those embellishments sound expressive, and impressing that cute girl in the front row.
• Muscles Remember Mistakes The process of building muscle memory is simple: The body moves, and the mind records the movement. It records with no judgment, like a security camera filming a bank lobby or a stenographer typing testimony in a courtroom. So when you perform mistakes, your muscle memory records those movements just as it records correct movements. When you mess up, you might think, “Shoot, that’s the fifth time I hit that wrong note!” but your muscle memory is diligently recording the incorrect movement all the same.
• Avoid Mistakes by Simplifying and Slowing Down When I was practicing “Castles Made of Sand,” I’d try a big musical phrase, and play it as fast as I could. Of course, it sounded like the cat was playing the guitar, and I was digging myself into a hole because my muscle memory was recording all those mistakes. What I should have done was simplify the music by just choosing a couple notes to work on at a time. Once I had those down, I could either try a few different notes, or add a few notes to the notes I’d already learned. Also, I should have slowed down enough to make correct playing easy. This is actually really hard to do—I’m constantly telling my students to slow down. It’s not just impatience, it’s that people don’t realize how slow slow is. Slow is however slow you need to go to play without mistakes. For beginners learning a lick, this could mean one note every three or five seconds. As Jay put it, “The slower you go, the faster you’ll get there.”
• Simplifying Also Means Isolating the Skill You’re Learning Say you’re learning to strum a new song that has a new strum pattern and new chords. Your job is to build muscle memory both with your left hand (fretting the new chords) and your right arm (strumming the new pattern). The problem is, until you build muscle memory, you have to exert all your focus on the skill you’re learning, making sure you don’t make mistakes. So how do you focus on fretting those new chord shapes while making sure you strum correctly? You can’t. So instead, you practice the two skills separately. Fret the new chords and just strum once to make sure they sound good. Repeat. Then practice the strum pattern while fretting just one chord. Repeat. Once you have both skills in your muscle memory, you can practice them together.
• Repeat Until You’ve Really Got It Jay said that it takes between 20 and 80 correct repetitions of a musical phrase—with no mistakes—to build muscle memory. If you make a mistake, simplify or slow down, and then start counting from one again. Whether it takes 20 or 80 depends on your natural aptitude. Eddie Van Halen is probably one of those 20-reps guys. I am closer to being in the 80 club, and proud of it. Go 80′s!
• Learning Strum Patterns Is A Little Different I’ve found that you don’t have to be quite so militant about avoiding mistakes when you’re learning new rhythms, like a new strum pattern. While simplifying and slowing down is helpful, learning rhythms also involves the mysterious process of “getting into the groove.” It demands that you loosen up, stop worrying about sounding bad, and try to feel the music. So don’t worry as much about mistakes. Once you get the strum pattern down, you’ll have plenty of time to obliterate the mistakes from your muscle memory as you strum that pattern over and over and over and over.

I hope this revolutionizes the way you practice. It’s made my own practice so much more enjoyable and productive. Let me know if you’ve found it helpful, have any other tips, or if you’re interested in guitar lessons in Seattle.