How to read strumming arrows (D, U and the “and”)

Four downstrokes are already running and they do not stop. Now we add the movement on the way back, and straight away it turns into the notation you see in every songbook and on every chord sheet. You do not need to read music for it. You need to look at a row of arrows and know what the hand does.

Three signs, and the rest is detail

Strumming notation has three signs: an arrow down, an arrow up and an empty slot. They are also written as the letters D and U, and in standard notation a downstroke looks like a staple, an upstroke like the letter V. It is the same notation in three forms. For today the first one is enough.

sign	what we call it	what the hand does
↓ D	downstroke	the pick sweeps down through the strings of the chord
↑ U	upstroke	the pick comes back up, usually catching the thinner strings
·	empty slot	the hand keeps going but misses the strings

How many strings to take on the way up is the one point where the books argue. Krenz tells you to sweep every string of the chord going down and only a few of the thinnest ones coming up. McAllister wants both directions to sound equally loud. Start with Krenz, because it is easier to land, and come back to the question once you can hear the difference.

Polish strumming sheets add three more marks, and a songbook diagram is unreadable without them: a small black square above an arrow is an accent, the letter X is a stroke into muted strings, and an arrow drawn in grey is a movement that never touches the strings, which is exactly our empty slot.

Between the numbers there is an “and”

So far you counted one, two, three, four. Now put the word “and” between those numbers: one and two and three and four and. Four slots have become eight, all of them equal. A number is a movement down, an “and” is a movement up, and that stays true in every eighth note pattern you will ever read.

One of the books has an exercise for this without a guitar. Say “one and two and” out loud, leaning your body forward on the numbers and coming back upright on the “and”. Down and up then get a direction in space instead of just a name. Do it in the kitchen before you sit down with the instrument.

Then play straight eighths on one chord: down, up, down, up, eight strokes through the bar. That is step two in every book I read, and the only one you have to go through before any pattern turns up.

A pattern is made by taking strokes away

Here is the whole trick, and the best idea I found in the Polish teaching material. You are not learning a new rhythm. You take the eight movements you already have and in two places you stop touching the strings: on the “and” after one, and on beat three itself. The hand carries on with the same movement, only above the strings.

↓↑↓↑↓↑↓↑

↓·↓↑·↑↓↑

Start this lane and listen to what a dot means: the slot lights up like every other one, but no click lands on it. Pull the slider down to sixty and count out loud along with it.

What is left is this: down on one, down on two, up on the “and” after two, up on the “and” after three, down on four and up on the “and” after four. Written out, that reads D DU UDU. You will also meet a version without the last upstroke, and print calls both of them basic; it is the same pattern with one stroke fewer.

The movement in the air has a name

A movement with no stroke is called a ghost strum and it is not decoration. One author writes that your strumming hand is your private conductor, and a conductor keeps waving while the orchestra rests. McAllister says it over one specific bar: you still move your hand down on beat three, you simply do not hit the strings. If the hand pauses there, the whole bar falls apart, not just the pattern.

This pattern has a name and a ladder

In Guitarmatic we call it Harpagan, the scout strum. Polish strumming sheets simply say “harpagan”, the English speaking web calls it “Old Faithful”, and the books that teach it do not name it at all: Krenz labels it with a description of the movements, the Polish method calls it “the target strum”. The name changes nothing in your hand, but it makes it easier to search for.

An accent is a stroke louder than its neighbours, and here the downstrokes carry it. The natural weight of a 4/4 bar sits on one and three, where the kick drum lives, while two and four are the backbeat that the snare answers on. Eighty years of rock and pop stand on that backbeat, so once you start hearing it you stop losing the “one”.

Notice as well that beat three has no stroke at all here. The sound taken on the “and” after two carries across the third beat, and that is what gives this pattern its character; Krenz and McAllister both describe it exactly that way, as a held note instead of a stroke.

In the app this pattern has its own tutorial and goes up a ladder: listen, count, hand alone on muted strings, tap with a measurement, and finally with a chord. That is exactly the four steps the books give for walking into a metronome, with a verdict added at the end.

What confused me

For the first few days I read the arrows as a list of orders: down, down, up, up, down, up. I learned the list by heart and lost my place halfway through the bar every time. What helped was turning it around: there is no list, there is a movement that never stops, and the arrows only say when the hand touches the strings. Since then a new pattern takes me a few minutes, because it is always the same movement with different holes in it.

The second thing: I took an empty slot for a rest, and it is not one. A rest is silence written into the music, while an empty slot in a strumming pattern is a movement of the hand that you simply cannot hear. Every time my hand stopped there, the next stroke came in late.