How To Consistently And Easily Hit The Right Strings While Strumming
by Ryan Mueller
Whether you’re just starting out on guitar, or are a seasoned player and have been playing for several years, you can probably recall the times where you were strumming your chords, but weren’t hitting the right strings for each chord. This is frustrating, because even if your fingers are in the right spot and aren’t muting other strings by accident, our chords still won’t sound good. You then slow down massively, so that you can hit the right strings each time and get afraid to speed things up – even if your chord changes are fast – because you know that the moment you do, you’ll lose that coordination in your strumming hand and your playing will sound sloppy.
Before I explain how you can quickly improve in this area, let me point out something that a lot of beginner guitarists do to try to solve this problem: they place their pick on the thickest string that needs to be played, and then they strum down. While this WILL help you build dexterity, it does so rather slowly, and this type of motion isn’t something you’re going to want to use in your regular guitar playing. The exercise I will explain to you, not only will build dexterity faster, but will directly and immediately apply to your regular guitar playing.
The idea behind this exercise is quite simple –it’s a very large, and VERY slow strum, as if you took a video of yourself strumming normally and then massively slowed it down the recording. Start off with a 4-string chord (D Major for example), bring your strumming arm way up, and then slowly bring it down while keeping your eyes focused on the D string, striking it first and followed by the rest of the high strings. Make sure that you are strumming straight across the strings, rather than swooping in and away from the guitar.
Once you have done 15 strums like this, then switch to 5-string chords (such as C Major and A minor) and do the same thing but now striking the A string first. This will be more difficult because the area you must cover is now larger, while the area you must avoid is now smaller. It’s very important that you start off going VERY slowly, and that the arm motions are big– you let your arm travel further down after hitting the strings, and you bring your arm way up before strumming down again.
You can also do this exercise with upstrokes – in that case, you start off hitting the high E string and will then move your pick away after striking the D or A strings (depending on what chord you’re playing). Another variation is where you only strike specific strings in the middle, and avoiding both E strings (for example, playing a C Major chord and only striking the A, D, G and B strings). The reason why this exercise works so well is because you are quite literally performing the motion you will be doing when you are strumming comfortably and up to speed, therefore it directly translates into your real guitar playing.
All that said and done, let me make it clear that even when you improve in this area of your playing, you still may slip up every now and then and hit a wrong string (especially if you’re like me and love to move around a lot on stage!). The fact of the matter is that you’re human and this is a skill where it’s very hard to have 100% accuracy all the time. Ideally, we would like to hit the correct strings every single time, but in this case it’s much more realistic to try to get it right around 85% of the time.
In my experience, while this IS something that you can measure, so that you can see incremental gains over time, my students and I have found that as you mind this area of your playing over the long term, the improvement sneaks up on you without you realising it. Even if you do hit the wrong strings every so often, just keep going and don’t beat yourself up over it. The show must go on!
About The Author:
Ryan Mueller gives guitar lessons in Etobicoke that regularly help musicians feel fulfilled by improving their guitar playing and writing their own original music.
Before I explain how you can quickly improve in this area, let me point out something that a lot of beginner guitarists do to try to solve this problem: they place their pick on the thickest string that needs to be played, and then they strum down. While this WILL help you build dexterity, it does so rather slowly, and this type of motion isn’t something you’re going to want to use in your regular guitar playing. The exercise I will explain to you, not only will build dexterity faster, but will directly and immediately apply to your regular guitar playing.
The idea behind this exercise is quite simple –it’s a very large, and VERY slow strum, as if you took a video of yourself strumming normally and then massively slowed it down the recording. Start off with a 4-string chord (D Major for example), bring your strumming arm way up, and then slowly bring it down while keeping your eyes focused on the D string, striking it first and followed by the rest of the high strings. Make sure that you are strumming straight across the strings, rather than swooping in and away from the guitar.
Once you have done 15 strums like this, then switch to 5-string chords (such as C Major and A minor) and do the same thing but now striking the A string first. This will be more difficult because the area you must cover is now larger, while the area you must avoid is now smaller. It’s very important that you start off going VERY slowly, and that the arm motions are big– you let your arm travel further down after hitting the strings, and you bring your arm way up before strumming down again.
You can also do this exercise with upstrokes – in that case, you start off hitting the high E string and will then move your pick away after striking the D or A strings (depending on what chord you’re playing). Another variation is where you only strike specific strings in the middle, and avoiding both E strings (for example, playing a C Major chord and only striking the A, D, G and B strings). The reason why this exercise works so well is because you are quite literally performing the motion you will be doing when you are strumming comfortably and up to speed, therefore it directly translates into your real guitar playing.
All that said and done, let me make it clear that even when you improve in this area of your playing, you still may slip up every now and then and hit a wrong string (especially if you’re like me and love to move around a lot on stage!). The fact of the matter is that you’re human and this is a skill where it’s very hard to have 100% accuracy all the time. Ideally, we would like to hit the correct strings every single time, but in this case it’s much more realistic to try to get it right around 85% of the time.
In my experience, while this IS something that you can measure, so that you can see incremental gains over time, my students and I have found that as you mind this area of your playing over the long term, the improvement sneaks up on you without you realising it. Even if you do hit the wrong strings every so often, just keep going and don’t beat yourself up over it. The show must go on!
About The Author:
Ryan Mueller gives guitar lessons in Etobicoke that regularly help musicians feel fulfilled by improving their guitar playing and writing their own original music.