Strumming the Guitar

Book excerpt: Strumming the Guitar Book 1 is a detailed course for beginners and upward, focusing solely on the subject of guitar strumming. Separate sections take on strumming, changing chords and coordinating chord changes while strumming, therefore maintaining a thorough approach throughout with components broken down at every level. With this incremental method, this guitar strumming book enables the beginner to absorb everything important from the start and progress consistently as the difficulty level increases. Guitar Strumming Techniques - Before anything else, the basics of strumming are covered from the ground up for the beginner, assisted with professional hand drawn illustrations. Learn how to hold the plectrum for strumming, how to strum chords that require you to miss certain strings, pre-emptive chord changing, open strums and more. Guitar Strumming Patterns - There are 70 different guitar strumming patterns that can be used throughout the book, all written with easy to understand, graphical, strumming diagrams. Reading Rhythmical Notation - Understand the common language of music by becoming familiar with rhythmical notation. Learn whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes and their equivalent rests, dotted notes, ties and the basics of time signatures. All shown with clear charts and diagrams. Chord Changes - Seven groups of chord changes are included, made up almost entirely of open chords. The book starts with the easiest chord changes in which fretting finger locations can be shared, moving to chord changes in which fretting fingers relocate with the same shape, then more difficult chord changes where fretting fingers need to relocate in independent directions, such as C major to G major open chords or Aadd9 to Dmaj7 open chords. Strumming Exercises and Study Pieces - Every section includes strumming exercises that combine chord changes with strumming, each section concluding with a musical study piece using the skills learnt and practised in styles of Slow Pop, Spanish style, Grunge and Country Pop. In total there are 85 strumming exercises and 10 musical study pieces, while more combinations can be found by selecting from the 70 given strumming patterns to use with them. Audio and Video - All exercises and musical study pieces are demonstrated with audio (downloadable 154 MB). All study pieces have a demonstration audio track and a backing audio track in which the rhythm guitar part has been removed for you to play over. Online videos (of which there are 21 in total size of 775 MB) are also used to enhance explanations. Please Note: The eBook includes musical pieces so is not suitable for smaller screens.