Ukulele Strumming Pattern Secrets - Transform Your Playing!

1. Introduction!: It's not an overstatement to say that how you play with your right picking hand can radically transform how you sound as a musician. If you're playing chords and lately you feel like things are just getting a little dull. This is the chorus for you. We're going to spice things up with some really interesting strumming patterns and strumming techniques with the ukulele. We'll talk about how to hear beats in a song, as well as how to use both our fingers and the pick. When we're strumming. For every single strumming pattern, we're going to go through three things. Firstly, the pattern itself and how it works with a click. Secondly, we'll be practicing it slowly together using a chord progression. And then finally, we'll talk about a song you can go practice that strumming pattern with. So by the end of this course, you should be a pro at knowing strumming patterns, knowing when to use strumming patterns, and knowing how to use the strumming patterns. I'm looking forward to starting with you, so let's dive in together. 2. Fingers vs. Pick: Now as we're sitting here, you may have your fingers or you may have a pick. When we're playing the ukulele, either one is absolutely fine. Let's talk about how to use both of these. For the fingers, they're more commonly used on the ukulele. We're going to take our first finger and use it like a pick. I'm going to hold my first finger with my thumb and use it either on the nail or coming up with the pad of my finger. My finger is doing this back and forth with the strings. If we're using a pick, we're going to get a very different sound out of our ukulele. Now when I'm holding the pick, what I'm doing is I'm placing this pick between the tip and first knuckle of my first finger, so I'm going to curl it and I'm going to place the pick pointy end down and wrap my thumb over it. I've got a half fist going on and the point end of the pick sticking out. Now I have the option to go down or up just like that. Now, when do we use our fingers and when do we use a pick? Well, that's totally up to you. The pick produces a stronger, sharper sound and the fingers are a little more mellow and relaxed. Depending on the song, you might want to go back and forth. That's exactly what we're going to do in this course. I'm going to go back and forth between using my fingers and a pick from video to video. That's just so that whether you're using fingers or you're using a pick, you can see how something is done either way. 3. How Songs Work: Now before we learn our actual strumming patterns, we need to understand how songs work. We break up songs and count them using beats or clicks. Now, most songs can be broken down into either four beat or three beat songs. All that that means is when we're listening to a song, it sounds natural to count 12341234. Or sometimes it sounds more natural to count 123-12-3123 Now each of these can be subdivided using the word, and we can put the symbol in between each of these numbers. Now we've got one and 2.3 and 4.1 or over here, one and 2.3 and 1.2 Now you might see what's happening with my hand over here as I count, these are down beats and up beats. Now this is really important because as we talk about strumming patterns and techniques, we're going to reference down beats and upbeats. The numbers are all down beats and the symbols are all up beats. Now we can take on our ukulele, down strokes and up strokes and place them on these charts in creative ways. This is how we make strumming patterns. 4. Figure Out the Time Signature: Now we just figured out that most songs are either four beat songs or three beat songs. The question we have now is, how do we figure out which one a certain song is? There are two answers here. The first one has to do with listening to drums. Drums have three parts to them. I know this is a ukulele course, but this is really helpful for strumming patterns. Drums have three main parts to them. They have a kick, which sounds really deep. High hat, which is a symbol, it sounds a little more high and tinny. Then between them, a snare, which is a punchy, strong hit. Now that low sound and the snare is what we use our ears to listen to, to figure out how many beats a song is, Let's play a drumbeat real quick. We'll quickly hear the kick and the snare. Now we can count using these two parts of the drum, 12341234. Now this naturally sounds like a four beat song. If I counted three beats over that same thing, it would sound really bizarre. 123-12-3123 The accents, the hard parts of that drum are landing in different places. When I'm counting with three beats, we would call this a four beat song, since it flows a little bit better. Now we can do the same thing, vice versa. Let's play another drumbeat, and we can count along 123-12-3123 We hear how that flows naturally. And again, if I do the same thing, counting to 4 123-412-3412 our accent keeps landing in different places. This, we would say is a natural three beat song. The other way to do this is to listen to the other instruments in the song and try to hear when they change. Typically, songs will have chords being played. Now, when we hear a chord change, we want to pay attention to that and see what beat it changed at. Again, we would listen and count and see when our chord changed. If it changed at an even number, well, that's a pretty good hint that we might be working with four beats. If it changed at an odd number, like three or six, that's a really good indicator, we might be working with a three beat song. Now, these techniques aren't perfect because we're working with art, and people make artistic decisions. If we're having trouble figuring out how many beats a song is, well we can always just look it up. And typically for popular songs, people will already have written out how many beats the song is counted in. 5. Technique 1: Split Picking: The next three videos are going to cover three strumming techniques that we're going to be practicing and using as we learn our strumming patterns. The first one we've got here is called split picking. Now we've got four strings on our ukulele, and there are two ways to do all of these strumming patterns. One way is, as we're picking the strings, we hit all of them at the same exact time. Whether I'm going down or up, I'm hitting all four strings. Split. Picking almost turns this into two instruments coming down. We're actually going to aim a little bit and just hit the first three strings coming up. We're going to do the same thing. We're going to aim and only hit three strings. What this does is it means not every string is played. Every time we strum, it splits our picking. It means that every other time we strum, it sounds a little bit different. Here's a G chord without split picking, okay? It sounds good and it sounds full. And there are important times for that in songs. Now let's try that same exact chord with the split picking, that's going to make one consistent chord a lot more interesting over time. Again, as we learn strumming patterns, don't forget to integrate a little bit of split picking when you think it sounds nice with the song. 6. Technique 2: One Rest: This second strumming technique is called One Rest. It's called that because we're breaking each strum into one note and then the rest of the notes. This has almost got a country sound to it. Let's try changing from a chord to a C chord. Here's our progression without the one rest method. Now I'm going to separate the bottom string and make it my one and the other three strings. The rest, just like the split pick method, that brings a really interesting effect to the same chords with the same amount of beats. And it's just another tool that you can put in your tool belt and pull out when you think it's appropriate for a song. 7. Technique 3: Slap Mute: Our final technique here is going to have to do with percussive mutes. Now a mute is when we actually take our picking hand and we place it on top of the strings as they're ringing out to cut them off. This really has a cool effect, It can be the difference between your audience getting, getting bored and getting a little head Bob going on. Let's again move from this time to now between G and D. We're going to put a good gap of space. And we're going to do that because we're going to see the difference between letting chords ring out and using percussive mutes. Here's ore G to D without the percussive mutes. Drones on a little bit. Now if we toss in some percussive mutes, what we're going to do is creatively place our hand down or even slap a little bit, just to add almost a percussive kind of sound. That's a lot more interesting than just letting them ring out. Those are three techniques, not necessarily patterns, but techniques that we can use in any of the patterns we're about to go over. 8. 4 Beat: Downstrums: We're going to learn 74 beat strumming patterns, 73 beat strumming patterns, and then one strumming pattern each for a five beat or seven beat song. Now this is the first video covering four beat strumming patterns. And we're going to start really simply, all we're going to do is on 123.4 we're going to strum down. That's all there is to it, so I'm going to move back and forth between A and C, and I'll start by showing what this sounds like, then we can play together to move forward. Let's make sure we know a G and C chord. If you do know them, let's get started on this rowing pattern. There's one really important thing I want to mention there. Before we try that together, you'll notice that for one of those repetitions I played for only two beats, and C for only two beats. I mentioned that because that's something you're going to come across pretty often in a song with four beat or three beat strumming patterns, it doesn't necessarily mean that every chord will last four beats. It does mean that the chords will be spread out over four beats. Maybe it will even last twice as long, like eight beats or six beats. But once we divide a song and recognize, oh, that's a four beat song, well it's going to help us figure out a strumming pattern, but the chords can still be 2468 beats. It's anyone's guess, so let's try that together. Okay, we won't do any of the two beat chords. We'll do four beats on, four beats on C really slowly. 12343. Nice. Okay, now let's think about a song that would be great to practice this with. The song that we've got here is blowing in the wind. Check it out. We'll run through those chords with that pattern. 9. 4 Beat: Basic Rock Strum: Let's talk about a basic rock strum. Now this one is just the next level after the basic strum we just did. This one here goes up. Okay, Do up, so it would sound something like this. Let's try this together and let's move between about an F minor chord and a C chord really slowly. 123-41-2342 Awesome. That's great. So we've got a gap here on the two and that's okay. Again, a lot of the beats that we're playing here, we're going to skip or not think about. We can almost think about them as silent. They're not imaginary, they're very real. We're just skip over them. And that helps us make creative decisions. Now a great song to practice this one with is Wonderwall by Oasis. 10. 4 Beat: Calypso Strum: Our third strumming pattern is a calypso strum, which has got more of a reggae feel to it, you can think Bob Marley. Now, for reggae and this strumming pattern, we're going to put our emphasis on 2.41 234 on two. We're going to sum, going to sum. Now, something really important about this one is the technique we talked about earlier of the percussive mute. We're going to play and mute it. And mute it, so we're not going to let it ring. We're going to mute something like this. Let's try that together and we'll play that exact pattern there. Let's move between C and back to 123-41-3333 Now a great song to practice. This one will stick with Bob Marley here and do No Woman No Cry. 11. 4 Beat: Island Strum: Our fourth strumming pattern is going to be an island strum. You can think of Hawaiian, luau. Music with this one. Now here, looking at our strumming pattern and the beats, we're definitely going to make use of the up beats here. We've got one and 2.3, and 4.1, okay, a lot of up beats there on the end of two and the end of four. Now, if this looks tricky, stay with me, We're going to do it really slowly. It'll be great. Here's what this sounds like and since it's more of a calm island strum, I'm gonna switch to using my fingers. And here we've got, let me speed it up a little bit here. Let's practice this together. We'll give each chord four beats and we'll work on going between and an A really slowly. 1.2 and 3.4 Now a great song example of this would be Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Israel. 12. 4 Beat: Pop Ballad Strum: Now let's take a look at a pop ballad. Strom. This one we're going down, up, down, up, up. We're putting a little bit of a swing to it, because it's a ballad, it would sound something like this. And we can take a look at that together. We'll do nice and slow. Let's go between, how about a minor and this time. So starting on the A minor, 1.2 Well, slow it down, 1 and 2, and 3, and 4, and 1 and 2, and 3, and 4, and 1 and 2, and 3, and 4, and 1 and 2. Now a great song to practice this one with would be something like, Let it Be By the Beatles. 13. 4 Beat: Country Waltz Strum: Next we're going to take a look at a country waltz strum. Now, as you may have guessed, this strumming pattern is good for country music. Now this one goes down, down, down, okay? That's 1.2 3.4, It sounds something like this. So let's try this together really slowly. And we're going to move between an cord and a minor chord, okay? Small changes on the fingers. We can focus on the right hand. 1.2 and 3.2, 3.4 and 12.34 Now a great song to practice this strumming pattern with is Cold Cold Heart by Hank Williams. Or really anything by Hank Williams. Now I want to stop and notice something right there. We're hanging on these chords for a long time, right? Both the D and that seven, they just play over and over and it can be really dragging. So maybe this is a great time to either work on the split picking or the one rest method here, it can make it a little more exciting. 14. 4 Beat: Standard Beat: Now we've got the standard default four beat pattern. If you're not sure which one to use, you can go to this 110 times out of ten, it'll work. This one here is a little long, but it goes down up. I like to mentally split this into two sections to make it more understandable. The first section is up and then the second one is just back and forth, up, down, up. Really simple. I'm going to play it quickly to show you what it sounds like. And then we can count along and do it together. Okay? So we can play it together. And we're going to go really slowly here, and for this one I'm going to count the beats and the strums while we play together. And then I'll fade out and we can just go without any help from me. This one here, we're going to play between maybe just C and G. Okay? So starting with C, 1.2 and 3.4 and down, up, down, up, down, up, up, down, up one and 2.3 and 4.1 and 2.3 and 4.4 It can be weird, you know, we have two up strokes in the middle there. It can feel weird to go up and then up again. But really, one way to think about it is all of these patterns, we're going just down and up, back and forth. And we're just controlling if our hand is hitting the strings on the way by or not with something like this, we're coming up, down, and skipping and up again. So you can get kind of this almost circular pattern in there to keep hitting upstrokes, But that's our standard pattern. Now, we don't have a song for this pattern. And the reason why is that it's our default, we could practice any song with this pattern. And so that's what we're going to do, we're going to go back pick one or two of the songs we've already mentioned or some of the chord progressions we've done. And practice them with this strumming pattern. 15. 3 Beat: Blues Shuffle: Now for our three beat strumming patterns, the first one we're looking at is the Blues shuffle. Now we're used to counting in four beats so far, so we'll be super careful that we count 1.2 and 3.1 and 2.3 It's easy when you get in the habit of four to keep doing things as four beats. So for this one we're going really simple, okay? It's almost as easy as the first four beat. We were just doing down strokes on every count. Now we're just adding in one up stroke on the end. This is what it sounds like. Let's do that exact strumming pattern together from a to, to 123,123,123.123. Now a good song here to practice this one with, I think it fits perfectly, is Iris by the Gugu dolls. 16. 3 Beat: Swing Strum: Let's look at a swing strum together. Now this one really simply goes down and up on one, and down and up on 31.2 and 3.1. And 2.3 Now here's what this chord would sound like. Let's try this together, doing that exact strumming pattern from a minor to an E minor, 1 and 2, and 3, and 1, and 2, and 3, and 1, and 2, and 3, and 1, and 2, and 3, and 1, and 2, 3. Now a great song to practice this one with is Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. And note each of the songs that we're putting on these strumming patterns are matching because they're three beat songs. Not necessarily because it's the strumming pattern they use. Some of them match perfectly. But this is cool because it means that you can take any of these three beat patterns and play it with this song or another one of the songs we mention. So here's Hallelujah. 17. 3 Beat: Simple 3 Rest: Now we've got a simple three beat here. It looks like it's 12.3 But we're actually going to bring in the rest method. What we're going to do is play one on one and rest. Rest on 2.3 whatever chord we're doing. I'm playing one, rest, rest. Let's try this together. Let's go ahead and we'll play between C and how about a D? Seven. Now, if we're not familiar with a D seven, it's very similar to a D. We're just going to bar our first finger down and hit the third fret of the first. The reason we're going over that is that we use it in our song example in a minute. Let's go between again, C and D712. 3123, rest now as our song example. A great one here that fits perfectly is Piano Man by Billy Joel. 18. 3 Beat: Ballad Strum: This is a bald strum here. We're going down, the down up is now in the middle. Up, down, up, down. So let's take a look at what that sounds like. We can try that together. Maybe going between an E minor, a G, and an so 1 and 2 and 3, and 1 and 2, and 3, and 1 and 2, and 3, and 1 and 2 and 3. And now our song here is great. It fits perfectly. This is my favorite things from the sound of Music Down, up, down. 19. 3 Beat: Standard 3: Now we had a default four beat strumming pattern. We need our default three beat strumming pattern. Now this one here goes up. And it can be a little bit tricky sometimes to feel it as up, down, because that's how it sounds. If you put the emphasis on the wrong place, we need to make sure it's up, down, up, down. And we change our chord on that one. Okay, here's what it sounds like, okay? That's a pretty good one. And again, ten times out of ten, it will work for a three beat song if you're kind of stumped on what strumming pattern to use. So let's practice it together, going between the D seven that we had previously learned. And then maybe an chord, okay? So 1 and 2, and 3, and 1, 2 and 3, and 1, and 2, and 3, and 1 and 2. Now a great example song to practice this one with is take it to the limit by the eagles. 20. 3 Beat: Latin Strum: Now our final three beat strumming pattern is going to be a strum, which is really just a back and forth for every beat. We're going to go, and we can do this for four beat songs as well, but we're going to practice it with a three beat strum one and 2.3. And we'll be up. It's just a full, almost hectic strumming pattern. Here's what it sounds like, so let's practice that together. There will always be a strum happening, but we'll do it nice and slow. We'll do between G and C, 1 and 2, and 3, and 1, and 2, and 3, and 1, and 2, and 3, and 1 and 2, and 3. Now this works best for a strong part of a song rather than a song example. Again, we're going to go back look at songs that we've done and practice sections of that song, probably choruses with that pattern. 21. 5 Beat Strum: Now let's look at two obscure time signatures, five beats and seven beats. These aren't songs that you're going to come across all too often, but they are out there, so when we do eventually need them, it's really nice to know one strumming pattern for each and you'll see how they sound. Especially when we reference songs that you can practice these with. So for the five beat strumming pattern, we're going down, up, down, up. Okay, now that seems long and it is the longest one we've had so far because it's the most beats we've done. Here's what it sounds like. Okay, let's try that together. Going between just a minor and a 12345 song, you can practice that with. And it will click when you hear the melody. Is the mission impossible theme song, right? 12345. Anyway, that's an example of a five beat song. There are more out there. Obviously, we're only doing one strumming pattern for five beats. But with the five beat and the seven beat, you can look up specifically five beat songs and seven beat songs. 22. 7 Beat Strum: Our last strumming pattern together is a seven beat strumming pattern, which is enormous. Don't get discouraged. Remember, the biggest things to know are the four beat and the three beat. F I could pick just one thing for you to take away from this course. It would be the default for each one. The default four beat and the default three beat, you're set for life. But the more strumming patterns we know, the more variance we can play in our songs. Don't get discouraged or throw away your uklele at the seven beat one, but let's take a look at it. Now, this strumming pattern goes down, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. All right. One more time there. Down, down, up, down, up, down, up, down up. That is hefty. Now, what do we do with a seven beat song. Well, I can think of a couple. There's a song called seven by Guthrie Govin where we could count out seven beats. There's also money by Pink Floyd, where we can count seven beats, right? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, do, five, six, seven, D, da five, six, seven, one, da Those are two examples of songs where we do come across them, and these big strumming patterns are useful to know. Now, if you get discouraged and you're like, there's no way I'll ever play. I'm just going to avoid the seven beat songs. Well, remember, too, that there are always simplified strumming patterns for any amount of beats, right? You could do seven downstrokes, or you could do down and up or you can make your own and place them creatively. 23. Final Project: You've made it to the end of the course, congratulations, it's pretty amazing to be able to say you just learned 16 strumming patterns. Now we're going to look at a final project together. For our final project, we're going to do one of two things. The first thing we could do is look up one of your favorite songs, pick a strumming pattern for it. The other thing that you could do is write your own chord progression and then apply any of these strumming patterns to that you can record video or audio and upload it. We love hearing your recordings, but if you're a little bit recording shy or you don't have the ability to do that, you can also write out either the song you chose or what chords you wrote and the strumming pattern that you chose. Talk about how it went if you found it easy or difficult. I'm looking forward to seeing your final projects. 24. Congratulations!: You made it to the end, congratulations. By now, hopefully you're a little more comfortable with your strumming hand. Between the strumming patterns and the techniques that we learned. If you have any questions or comments, you can always reach out to me at Jacob at Lamblessons.com I love hearing from you. Or you can go to Wotm lessons.com again. Congratulations and I'll see you in the next one.