In this lesson we will:
I do hope you enjoyed your arrangement using the long strum in Lesson 4. We will come across this strum quite frequently in future lessons. All the 4/4 strums and pick strums you have learned so far are interchangeable. You may like to go over some of your songs and try them with different strums and pick strums.
By now you should be reasonably familiar with a wide variety of chords. Concentrate on changing your chords slowly and smoothly. In this way you will eliminate the pauses between chord changes. Remember that it is far better to play and sing a song very slowly and smoothly than to play too fast with hesitations.
Remember, too, that to increase the reach of your left hand, it is important to get your left wrist well forward as in the following illustration:
With this position you will find that chords such as G, G7 and C are much easier to hold.
In previous lessons we have only covered 4/4 timing. You will frequently find songs that are written in 3/4 time and, at a later stage, we will learn more variations of these strums.
To get the timing correct it may help, initially, to accent the first beat of the strum to get you going. You can always tone it down later if its too strong.
Practice these three strums without any chords on until you get the feel of the rhythm.
Now practice them counting to get the timing correct. (Click on the strum diagrams above to hear how each should sound.) Note, that with the pick strum, you should use alternating bass strings as you learned in lesson 3.
Put easy chords on and do a number of strums on each chord. Keep practicing them until the timing becomes completely automatic.
You will be using these strums with this lesson's song.
Here are the words and chords of your new songs. Instructions for each song and a sound file showing how the song should be played are included within each song.
Please note, that from here on in this course, I won't always fill in all the chords and timing marks for all verses of each song. I certainly will show them for the first verse and chorus, if there is one.
It is important that you develop your own sense of rhythm and ear, so please mark the additional verses yourself. If you have any difficulty in doing this, please let me know and I will gladly help you.
While the original intention of the paid course was to include personalized feedback from Joni on your progress and any problems you may experience, this no longer applies to these free lessons.
However, if you have found the lesson useful, Joni would appreciate an email from you on shuter@mweb.co.za
Congratulations on completing module 1 of this guitar course.
I'd really like you to go over all the songs and techniques you have learned in this module of the course and ensure that you are comfortable with everything we have covered to date.
In future we will be using strumming and pick strumming interchangeably with a variety of picks.
In Module 2 we will move on to picking. This is an entirely different technique to strumming. We will introduce a 4/4 jazz pick with alternating bass strings, many special picking techniques and variations, basic tab reading, chord progressions and, of course, new songs.
Unfortunately Module 2 was never fully developed.
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