Acoustic Guitar Lessons - Strum no.3

Our final Universal Strum is short in length and used on many classic songs such as Let It Be by The Beatles. Due to the way it cycles around can be confusing at first so we’ve left it until lesson four before introducing it to students. The beginner level of acoustic guitar lessons with Guitar in a Nutshell is all about getting you up and running as quickly as possible and this strum will complete the strumming side of things for now. At this stage you’ll have 3 Universal Strums all of which are simply colossal in terms of how many songs they can be applied to right across the musical spectrum.

As with each new strum, we’ll first build it up from scratch and loop it to drum tracks so you’ll be able to clearly hear how it works in a musical sense and practice it yourself until it becomes second nature. Then we’ll use the easy beginner chord progressions and apply our Strum No.3 to those. This is important since we don’t want to combine harder progressions with a newly learned strum and overload the difficulty rating. Once you’re able to successfully loop the strum with a drum track to the easier progressions you’ll have all you need to progress further and develop the strum with confidence to harder chord changes. Remember that with good quality acoustic guitar lessons their effectiveness all about how well the information is presented and explained to you.

At this point in the beginners level you should be feeling quite confident in how well you know all the chord shapes and have no shortage of things to practice. Don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t all gel together right away, sometimes the mind needs a little bit of space to process things especially if you’ve been learning at a fast rate and going through the lessons quickly. Give your brain a chance to catch up! Remember that the way to get the maximum benefit from our acoustic guitar lessons is to build each step very securely and not to rush.

The main challenge with Strum No.3 in particular is the fact that it leaves you with little time at the end to change chords and in order to perform it correctly it’s important to embrace a natural learning process. The video will show you how we don’t actually keep holding the chord down all the way through the strum but rather lift off on an upstroke. This will mean that you’ll be hitting a line of open strings just before you change to each new chord but when you’re playing at a normal speed it’s completely inaudible and actually sounds great. The other point, as already mentioned, is that this strum can be trickier than the others to loop however with a little slow practice you WILL get it down fluently.

One of the main advantages to completing the beginners level of acoustic guitar lessons is that you’ll finally have a very secure understanding of how strumming on guitar works. We’ll be learning more big Universal Strums later on in the coming lessons however with these three you already have a massive resource to draw from when playing along to songs on acoustic guitar. They will, in time, become so automatic that anytime you hear a song, you’ll also be able to mentally hear which strum number you would use to play it. That’s the ultimate goal, remember that.