In the last lesson we went over song form and we talked about the various components that make up a song form: the verse, and the chorus and the bridge. In this lesson we want to go over techniques that you might use to break down a particular part of a song, and learn how to strum that part.

 

So we’re going to start with an example. Let’s say this is a verse of a song that you’d like to learn.  So there’s specific things that you can do to simplify this and create some building blocks, so that when you learn it you can sort of start simple and add on to it, all right. So this is like a check-list of sorts.

 

The first thing that you want to do, for any strum pattern, is to learn the chords. If you can memorize them, great, but you just don’t want to get to a point where you’re playing them and then you freeze, and you say, what’s that chord. Or if you’re working off a piece of paper and you’re constantly going paper, guitar, paper, guitar, paper. It’s really hard to make the thing flow. So start out by just kind of learning the chords.

 

All right. Now in the example that I gave or I went through these chords, let’s look specifically at what I did here. So I took a G chord, and this is a four finger G chord. It’s a pretty standard type. We’ve seen this before. Then I went to a C add two. This is another chord that we’ve seen before. And remember for this one you have common fingers, so I just take the top two fingers and I move them over. The third chord was a bit of a new one, it’s called Dsus two. And it’s like a D chord but you lift up one of the fingers. So that’s my three chords. So I’m going to practice those until I know where the fingers go and I feel confident. That’s item number one.

 

Item number two is to sort of look a little bit more in detail at the switching. What I’m going to do is not even strum with the right hand, and just practice moving very quietly and very slowly from chord to chord, and just make sure I know where to put my fingers. And I’m also going to think about the order of the chords. I need to remember which chord comes after which chord, then I do this, then I do that.

 

So once I’ve got that much down I can start working on strumming these things.  Now, the first thing that we want to do is all the details like the downs and the ups and how many times I strummed it, you want to take that out, and you want to think about how many counts did the chord last for. For this you kind of have to be thinking about is this a song that has like a four beat pattern or if it’s a three beat pattern.  Okay, most songs have four beats and that’s what I use for my example.

 

So in order to demonstrate this we have to kind of think about the count. What I played was like [MUSIC], but underneath is like a rhythm. So if I think about the count I can practice going one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

 

So what I realized here is that my first chord lasted for four counts, then the next chord lasted for four counts, and then that last chord, the D sus two, that lasted for eight counts. So you want to be clear about how long each chord lasts. Then you maybe put on a metronome, if you want to go slow, and just sit here and go, one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

 

In this process if you realize, oh, I’m sort of forgetting some of the chords go back a couple steps and work on that. If you do these steps in this order you’re going to be in a really good position to sort of just add in the right hand details after all this is set up.

 

Now one thing you could even do before you add in all the details, is see if you can play along with the song just holding and strumming each chord once. Now, some songs might be a little bit too fast, that’s okay, it’s always a good idea to do things slow. So you might just have to work with the metronome.

 

But the basic idea is, if you can just go, one, two, three, four. One, two, and meanwhile the guitar player on the record is going [MUSIC] and you’re just going, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. This is going to create a really good rhythmic foundation, and you’ll be able to sort of add in the details afterwards. And a lot of times we’re tempted to go right to the details and it can take a really long time. This is like a technique; this is like a secret of sort that a lot of players use to make sure that they have the foundation before they start to do something really complicated.

So in the next few lessons we’re going to get into some of the details about how you can layer things in to make it sound more like the song. But remember to start with this checklist and these foundation steps and you’ll be good from there.