In this video, I'm going to show you how to strum just well enough to start playing some songs. So I won't get into many of the details, but I've got a whole chapter on it later with a ton of lessons. And I actually just added some more lessons to this chapter at the request of some students. So be sure to check that out. If you want more details, the basics of strumming is there's downstreams, where you're moving your hand downward, like that, pretty simple stuff. And then you have upstreams, where you go like this.

And so when you're playing a normal song, all you do is you kind of mix it up, so you use both. She'll notice I'm doing both up and down equally and then just depending on the mood of the song, you could add more downs with more ups, and you could start more fast, or you could do less. It's something that you'll develop with time and as you sort of build up your feel for the guitar. This will come very naturally. But for now, I just want to do a quick exercise if you can grab your pick, if you're a pic user and if not, you can just use your fingertip or your now, however you like to struggle, and just struggle with me, we're going to do some downs, we're just going to go down. And now we're going to double it right?

Perfect. And if this is hard for you, what you want to do is probably loosen up this right hand a little bit, so that you can imagine if you had just washed your hands and there's water, and you're just trying to get that water to drip off and you're just kind of like loosely hanging it, then do that. And it should make it easier to struggle a little more effectively. And also be aware that with every struggle, you don't have to hit all six strings, it doesn't have to be perfect. If you only hit a couple strings, like that was like the bottom five, or this might be like, you know, the top four, it still sounds pretty good and people don't really notice. And that's the beauty of playing the guitar is you get these really cool vibes by not hitting all the strings all the time.

So next we're going to do if you have your pixel, I want to Some upstreams we're just going to go up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. And with these Yeah, you keep it loose too. And with these, I'm usually only hitting a couple strokes, maybe something like this, as opposed to this. And if you had silver your pick, I want to go a little faster. So let's do so. And this will be easiest if you're just hitting those bottom couple strings.

Instead of Okay, and now I want to put them together. So we're going to do down, down, down and now let's try to double it so perfect. That's it for this lesson. If you want to learn more about strumming, just jump into the chapter and I've got a lot more details on how it works.