How To Strum Guitar - The Shuffle Strum

If you’ve been practicing and learning guitar with Guitar in a Nutshell you’ll already know that we use big and very powerful universal strums in order to open the door to 100’s of songs. A big part of learning how to strum guitar is knowing which strums are really important and which ones are merely derivatives of other more important strumming patterns. This saves not only time but also means your guitar lessons for beginners are focused upon what’s really important and what really matters. Guitar in a Nutshell teaches you how to strum guitar quickly and without all the fuss.

Once we break out of the initial 3 main strums No’s 1, 2 and 3 we are able to devote more time to learning how to play strumming patterns which are more specialised and less common. I say less common but only because they are in comparison to the big 3 we have already learned. Nevertheless, you’ll find these new strums used in countless songs and without them you’ll really struggle to find a way to play them.

One of these new patterns is called a Shuffle Strum. During certain periods in music such as when The Beatles were in their hay day, songs with a Shuffle feel were very common and you’ll still find that happening in today’s pop music too. An example of this would be Green Day’s “Holiday” which is a heavy song with a Shuffle feel. Other more classic examples of songs where a shuffle strum would be employed are The Beatles “Eight Days A Week” and The Monkeys “I’m A Believer”.

When teaching students how to strum guitar it can be helpful to relate new strums to old ones so that some common ground can be established. Looking closely at the strum directions for a Shuffle you’ll see that it’s extremely close to a standard Strum No.1, it’s just the ‘feel’ of it which is different. This feel is can be hard to master for some at first but it’s highly infectious and in some cases students must be careful that they resist the urge to put a Shuffle feel into all their strums. I’ve seen this before where a student will confuse a shuffle feel with what should be treated as a straight ahead guitar strumming pattern. It just goes to prove how catchy shuffles can be and probably why they are so widely used in pop songs to this day.

They key to learning how to produce a shuffle strum is to snap quickly the final pairings of Up Down Up Down. The full strum is written as D D U UD U, it’s those final two UD strokes which must be snapped together as distinctive pairs. This will then transform the strum into a shuffle feel. Shuffles are most commonly found in blues music where they are reduced to their most basic pattern of a constant UD UD UD UD and this is highly common with blues from all era’s. All we do in pop songs is develop that same feel into a more elaborate strum pattern.

When talking about how to learn to shuffle strum on guitar it’s probably a good idea to start at the blues form beginning since this will present the feel of the strum at it’s most obvious and naked. Learning how it should feel is important so that you can hear it in your mind. That is the most important thing when learning any rhythm. For more on how to strum guitar check out the many great videos we have on the site.