Quote:
Originally Posted by cindyw16
I can clearly see that I need to expand my strumming repertoire. Does anyone have any good leads ie; websites designed to help you in this area? The strumming styles I have learned in the past were from a looooong time ago AND because I lead kids music and the song are sooo basic and i have very little time to practice I seemed to have gotten into a rut and play the same strumming styles over and over and over and over  : |
An exercise I came up with (although, I'm probably not the first to do this
) to help break strumming ruts is to write out all of the 16th notes on a piece of paper like this:
1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a
And then at random circle certain beats (I'll use bold/underline here):
1 e &
a 2
e & a
3 e & a
4 e
& a
Then try to play the circled beats making sure your arm keeps swinging like a pendulum, where the
down strums would be 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & and the
up strums would be all of the e's and a's. Start out very slow (painfully slow) making sure each strum is in the correct spot and then speed up. An important point is
DO NOT stop your strumming hand! This allows you to play more complex patterns while still keeping your arm motion flowing.
On the times where you go two beats without strumming you can also make a smaller "up/down" motion so your hand doesn't come all the way back up across the strings and back down without strumming. Hopefully that makes sense, it's a lot easier to demonstrate than describe in words. But basically it is more efficient to make smaller movements when you aren't playing for a couple beats and it still keeps your arm moving in the "down/up" pendulum motion.
Hope that helps.
-tkr
