The Pop Strumming Pattern
Would you like to be able to play a cool rhythm pattern that you can apply to hundreds of different songs and chord progressions and sound awesome? Thought so!
Now you have played eighth notes, quarter notes, half notes, whole notes.
There are already loads of cool things you can do with combinations of these rhythms. Things get even more interesting when you add in rests.
Rests are silences that last for the same possible durations as the notes. So you can half whole, half, quarter and eigth note rests. When you see one, you should still move your arm, but you don’t strike the string where the rest is marked.It is written like this:
You can see this pattern starts with a quarter note, (down stroke) then we have two eighth notes (down up). Then an eighth note rest (the little marking aligned with count ‘3’ that looks a bit like a seven).
It’s vital here that you still bring your arm down in time as per the marked downstroke, aiming not to strike the strings. This will put you in exactly the right place to hit the upstroke that comes right after.
It may help you to say this to yourself:
1 |
+ |
2 |
+ |
3 |
+ |
4 |
+ |
DOWN |
DOWN |
UP |
MISS |
UP |
DOWN |