The first strum: four times down

A lesson ago your first song went past on four downstrokes and that was enough. Now we take those four strokes apart, because every strumming pattern that comes later grows out of them. There is no new grip to learn. There is one hand, one tempo and one rule you do not get to break.

Count to four before you hit anything

Every song has a pulse. It is the thing your foot taps when the radio is on, and you find it without thinking about it. Finding the “one” comes so early that babies react to a pulse with movement long before they can play anything. If you say “I have no rhythm”, it almost always means that nobody ever showed you.

Pulses come in groups, most often groups of four. That group is a bar, and the 4/4 sign tells you how many beats are in it. You count out loud: one, two, three, four, and back to one. Everything that happens here fits inside a single bar.

Count out loud, not in your head. Every course I read while writing this puts counting before touching a string, and it is the one step you can do on the bus.

Four downstrokes and not one more

Put down C. Strum down on one, two, three and four, then start the bar again. The hand works over the sound hole; nearer the bridge the sound turns metallic, nearer the neck it goes soft, but that is a choice of tone, not a mistake. The pick should sit at a right angle to your thumb and stick out far enough to sweep the strings in one movement: less sticking out gives you more control, more sticking out makes it easier to hit them all.

One stroke should sweep every string of the chord, not one or two of them. In C the thickest string carries a cross on the diagram, which means it is better left alone, and yet hitting it is not a big mistake. That is the first thing worth letting go of: aim for the middle of the chord and keep playing.

The “one” is a touch heavier than the rest. In ordinary rock and pop the kick drum sits on one and three while the snare answers on two and four, and if you cannot hear that, you have no way of telling where a bar begins. For now it is enough that your hand lands more firmly on the first beat than on the other three.

The movement comes from the wrist, but not in the first minute

Put the tips of your thumb and index finger together, then shake your hand loosely as if you were shaking water off it. That is the strumming movement: it comes from the wrist, not from the fingers and not from the whole arm.

One school says otherwise and it is worth knowing about. Tomo Fujita tells you to lead from the elbow at the start, because a wide swing holds the pulse more easily, and warns that experienced players keep their movement small, so do not copy them yet. Two goals, not a contradiction: the big swing guards the time, the wrist gives you tone. Start with a movement somebody could see from across the room, then tuck it into the wrist once the tempo sits.

The hand does not stop. That is the whole secret

Of everything written about rhythm, this is the best confirmed sentence: the hand keeps moving even when it is not hitting the strings. Steve Krenz put it in capitals as the secret of his whole strumming session, and another author explains it with a conductor, who keeps waving while the orchestra rests. The books repeat the same instruction: do not stop even when your left hand has missed the chord, because the left hand only learns to hurry when the right one refuses to wait.

In practice this means one thing. When you move from C to G and you are late, do not stop the hand: drop the fourth stroke and come back in on the next “one”. The books give exactly that as a recipe instead of a ban. The bar has to be right, the chord is allowed to be late.

The metronome from day one

The order in which the books walk you into a metronome is always the same, and it does not start with playing. First you only listen to the clicks and do nothing, which is the step nobody should skip. Then you count out loud, one, two, three, four, then you tap the body of the guitar and keep counting, and your hands land on the instrument last.

Set ♩ = 72 and play one chord for eight bars, four strokes to a bar. A metronome at 60 is exactly one click a second, so 72 is a shade quicker than a ticking clock. Once eight bars go by without the hand stopping, add the second chord: four strokes on C, four on G, round and round.

One voice disagrees here, honestly. Fujita argues that at the very start a metronome gets in the way, because all your attention goes into hitting the click instead of feeling the pulse. Even the authors who want it on from day one half agree: if it is too much work for your head, switch the click off. Two minutes with it, two minutes without, then decide which was steadier.

Three things that break this bar

fault	how it sounds	what to do
you speed up	the click falls behind you	record four bars on your phone and listen
stiff wrist	the stroke snatches, the pick catches	shake the water off your hand, play without the click
the hand stops on a change	a hole in the sound right at the chord change	drop the fourth stroke, never the movement

What confused me

I was sure I was playing evenly. I only switched the click on after a week, convinced it was a formality, and it turned out that from the third bar on I was getting faster and faster. That is normal: while you play you cannot judge yourself, because all of your attention is sitting in the left hand. One of the authors admits the same thing in his funk book, except in his case it was his foot, which for years was not with the click and quietly ruined everything he played.

The second thing: I thought a strumming pattern was a new movement I had to learn, and it was not. There is one movement, it was in my hand from the start, and the learning is only in not interrupting it.