Thursday, June 18, 2009

Wonders of the guitar.

Are you feeling tired of playing the guitar? Are you finding the guitar to be a painful experience? Are your fingers starting to blister and tear? Are you finding chords to be a pain in the butt because of all the memorising and applying? Are your fingers getting cramped due to the consistent depressing of the strings? Well, do not throw in the towel yet. Let me share something that has been an inspiration for myself to continue strutting forward. I have a videos for all three types of guitars which I believe would help you stir your passion in this wonderful instrument.



For the cool electric guitarist,


For the sentimental acoustic guitarist,


And lastly, for the jazzy bassist.

All awesome pieces of music right? Do you now understand why I said the guitar is one of the most awe-inspiring, romantic and also cool instrument ever created? Do you feel that you have the sudden urge to pick up the guitar that you put down just awhile ago? Do you feel the sudden spike in passion towards the guitar? Do you have the sudden euphoria due to the fact that with enough practice, one day you might be able to play something like that? That is what I felt when I saw those clips and hopefully I would be able to play something in that caliber. XD

Anyway, back to the reality of being an amateur guitarist. Now that we have learnt some basic chords, lets learn some strumming techniques but before we get to learning how to strum one must understand first the meaning of a strum.

Strumming is actually the brushing of one's finger over the strings of a string instrument, namely the guitar. Guitarists use either their finger or a pick to strum. What we first have to understand is that the theory behind strumming is that it runs on what is called a 'bar' which usually consists of 8 beats. This is counted as one, and, two, and, three, and, four, and. Sounds confusing? Well it is. I faced this problem too but fortunately for you, I have already cracked this mystery so you guys get to understand it easy. 'How am I going to explain it to you', you might ask? Well the answer is easy. Video XD.



I hope you have a better understanding of how strumming works now. There are many types of strumming. One of it was the one shown in the video. I call it up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down or (U,D,U,D,U,D,U,D). A few other examples of strumming which I find useful are:

slow-song-type strumming.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
D U U D U U D 0

rock-type strumming
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
D D D D D D D D

up-beat-type strumming
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
D 0 D 0 U U D U

sentimental-type strumming
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
D 0 D 0 U U U D

*0 means do not play.


There are many other types of strumming which you will notice when you see other guitarists play their instruments, but these are the basic strumming patterns that would suffice. Keep practising these strumming patterns and in time you will start to invent your own strumming patterns.



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