Free Guitar Lessons - Playing Tips

Using the 'Open Strings'

The term 'open strings' refers to the strings that are not being pressed down by your fretting hand fingers. Open strings are very useful to make changes from chord to chord sounds smooth and efficient. By playing an open string in between chord changes, your fingers will be more prepared to form the next chord that's coming. The best time to use open strings in your strumming is at the last moment before you change your chord, usually at the 4th beat or at the '&' of the 4th beat. Here's an example.

                                            | 1 2 3 open | 1 2 3 open |

                                                                                 or..

                                     | 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 open | 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 open |

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Playing with 'Dynamic'

'Dynamic' is a tool that you can use to add more 'feel' to a simple 'strum pattern'. If you found yourself strumming the chords with the same amount of loudness on every single strum, than you need to have some dynamic control to tune it down. What you need to do is simply varying the loudness of your strum on certain places. In relation with exe 3 and 4 'new strum pattern' in the 'Beginners Lesson 1' section, let's take a look at the example below.


                         Exa 1= |1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &|     or..      Exa 2= |1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &|
                                      S S L S S S L S                             L S L S S S L S

*S=soft
*L=loud

from this example, you'll notice that beat 2 and 4 in exa 1 and beat 1, 2 and 4 in exa 2 are in bold character. This is where you should place your louder strum while applying a softer strum on the rest of the beat and the '&'s'. Try and practice this and incorporate it into your playing right away.

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Playing with 'Dynamic' part 2

When you try to play a combination of soft and loud strum pattern as in the previous example, you'd probably find yourself strumming just some of the strings(normally the lower strings) to produce a softer sound and strumming more or all the strings for a louder sound. What you end up doing is actually creating a very interesting variation to your strumming technique, similar to the strumming technique in exe 4 'Beginners Lesson 1', which highlighted the alternation between the bass and the treble strings. You can almost hear the effect of a drummer playing the snare on the 2nd and on the 4th beat. Keep it up because this is another technique that can really add color to your playing.

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