Strumming Patterns For Guitar
As there are many different picking techniques, and any number of chord inversions, there are different strumming patterns for guitar. A list of strumming patterns is nearly impossible to define, as there are variations from jazz patterns all the way to country strumming patterns (and every style in between) that go well beyond the usual guitar strumming patterns. As many players as there are, you can be assured new strumming guitar techniques, as well as guitar strumming tricks will be invented to challenge the old patterns. Learning guitar chords strumming or just the basics of strumming the guitar could take a few months, but years to master.

Basic strumming patterns is where this all starts. Down strokes or up strokes, it is imperative you keep the rhythm steady (unless of course you want a slower or different strum on your opposing direction). Sometimes within the same stroke you might slow down or speed up, but these are beyond the basic strumming patterns. In fact there are those basic strumming patterns where you don’t even attempt opposing down-strokes and upstrokes, just a nice steady flow with a flick of your wrist in one direction.

No matter what stroke you are trying, what level of skill you have, the motion with guitar and strumming should come from the rotation of your wrist. Overall it is best not to stiffen your wrist stiff when strumming (even picking).

There are some differences in strumming a guitar, based on the type of guitar you play. Strumming patterns for acoustic guitar can often become very percussive; there is a lot of bouncing off the strings. In some ways the acoustic makes guitar strumming tricks easier and the flourishes you manage might seem very showy because of the big sound you can get by moving your wrist fast across the acoustic sound hole. But at the same time, placement of your hand is very important when trying various strumming patterns for this type of guitar; no matter how you are strumming the guitar you get the best results by playing directly over that sound hole.

Guitar strumming techniques for electric can be different, but basically it is still up to how well you move your wrist…and where you strum. The pick-ups in an electric guitar (or an acoustic with pick-ups) allow you to play at various places over the body of the instrument. Strumming the guitar close to or away from pickups, even choosing to play over one pick-up instead of another alter the sound of even the most basic strumming patterns.

As a magician might claim, it really is “all in the wrist”. By regulating your speed during guitar strumming, adding some guitar strumming tricks like hammers and pull-off’s, and even actually lifting your hand from the guitar, you can introduce whole new strumming patterns into your playing. The trick really is to keep the motion consistent and your wrist placed correctly (and your pick held tightly (if you are using a pick). The dexterity and speed you will gain in practicing a good steady strum will help you even as much or more so, then the scales you can run off. There are a bunch of good lead players out there, in fact almost everyone who picks up an electric guitar wants to play lead, but how many players do you know even know the most basic country strumming patterns, or how many of us can keep up a consistent, odd timed rhythm through an entire song?

Guitar strumming is a basic of playing the instrument.

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Brad Finley is senior editor of MyGuitarWorkshop - Guitar Lessons and Music Theory. Website provides guitar lessons and instructions for all level guitar players. Click for more Guitar Theory Lessons
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Please feel free to publish this article using the author information and the links above.

How To Get Your Guitar To Sound The Way You Want
No matter how well your guitar plays when you first bring it home, you will come to find it doesn’t play exactly the same way after a time (sometimes even a small period of time). In some cases the instrument’s action and feel is pretty much to your liking, but you still want to make adjustments to fit your particular playing needs. Whichever the case, you will want a guitar set-up to make the guitar play the way you want it to.

Guitar set-ups are something you can do yourself (if you have the time and tools) or a good tech can accomplish this in about an hour. In some cases you might be well versed in acoustics but you don’t know how to setup an electric guitar and you want your first one to sound and play as good as the acoustics you own. In other cases, you might be a died-in- the-wool blues player who has just bought a great hollow-body and you are looking for a basic jazz guitar set-up. Don’t be discouraged, most guitars need a set-up sometime during their lifespan (often times more then once) and sometimes these guitar set-ups require mechanical skills you do not have.

Every tech would agree that the most basic part of guitar set-ups is adjusting the truss rod. This is done for setting-up strings for the right height and play, or ‘action’ (according to your particular tastes, of course) and adjusting string intonation for accuracy. What you ultimately want is just the right amount of movement in the middle of the fret-board so your strings can vibrate freely when plucked, but not be too loose. Whether it is a classical guitar set-up or the completely opposite end of the spectrum and you’re getting your jazz guitar set-up, how much play or action you want is really up to how you play, and how you want to play. And if you change the gauge of your strings, you might want another guitar set-up to accommodate.

All of the above is achieved by adjusting the truss rod in the guitar’s neck. This would be for a basic electric guitar set-up or acoustic.

In a basic electric guitar set-up, you will also be checking your pick-ups. If they are not close enough to the strings (or too close) or they are corrupted in anyway this should all be dealt with during guitar set-ups. If you own an acoustic guitar with a pick-up, say built into the bridge, all the electronics, battery check, dial controls can also be checked during a basic guitar set-up.

Frets are another story entirely; from classical guitar set-ups to electric guitars, to every type in between, your frets need to be smooth and tight. A set-up is the perfect time to get those frets filed so they are smooth or re-glue any loose ones. Be warned though, this is where you could rack-up the cost in guitar set-ups, as fretwork can get costly.

Irregardless if it is a basic electric guitar setup, acoustic or a jazz guitar setup, professionals should be charging around $35.00 for guitar set-ups. As mentioned before, fret leveling and re-gluing will increase the price. But set-ups are well worth it if you want to really get your guitar playing sounding the way you want.

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Brad Finley is senior editor of MyGuitarWorkshop - Free Guitar Lessons. Website provides free guitar lessons and instructions for all level guitar players. Click for more Free Guitar Lessons
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Please feel free to publish this article using the author information and the links above.

How To Connect A Guitar To A Computer
So many players want to record guitar playing on their computer. Digital recording is more popular than ever for pros and amateurs alike. But there are some things to be considered when you connect a guitar to a computer; mostly how you want to connect the instrument, and the quality of the recording you hope to capture. The type of guitar computer interface you choose will greatly affect the sound of the electric guitar through the computer and the overall recording you can expect.

While it is possible to play guitar through a PC just by plugging it in, this basic approach is likely to be fine for most though many players don’t like sacrificing a good sound for the ease of quick setup. Electric players need a ‘high impedance’ input to get their electric guitar to connect to a computer, and though most computer soundcards come with high impedance inputs, these inputs are usually not strong enough to get a good guitar signal or in the long run, for recording guitar effects for PC. This lower ‘impedance’ can cause noise problems too. A player can avoid all this of course by plugging the guitar into a ‘line-in’ jack, instead of the ‘mic-in’, but then the all-important preamp is needed.

Almost any one attempting to connect a guitar through their computer or familiar with recording a guitar into a mixing consol should be familiar with a preamp. The preamp does exactly what its name implies, it “amps” the signal before it goes into the plug-in. Therefore your guitar’s signal will get that extra boost it needs when you record guitar on a pc…or into any other device that is not an amp. There are plenty of external interfaces that combine computer soundcards with a preamp. Or if you like more components to you set-up you can always buy a preamp separate from your sound card. There are a lot of stand-alone vintage preamps out there that will not only boost your signal, but warm your sound before it goes into the ‘cooler’ digital domain of your pc.

It’s not only the pristine quality of digital that makes recording guitar on a pc so much fun, it is also portability. With very little equipment you can put down a riff (or an entire song actually) into a laptop! And added to all this wonderful technology is the fact that there are so many recording guitar effects for pc now on the market, a player can access different amp sounds and settings, effects. Well after you have wrestled with how to connect a guitar to your pc and have recorded a strong signal, you can call record guitar effects with pc during recording or in post-production.

Of course information about how to connect your guitar to a pc and the wonderful wide world of effects is available through an on-line pc guitar tutor and websites devoted to digital recording. You can even purchase a computer guitar tuner (some programs include a free computer guitar tuner) so everything you will ever need is self-contained in your rockin’ pc! Some players are even recording parts, then downloading and sending these pieces of tunes to musician’s half-way across the world.

The possibilities really are unlimited for the guitar player who says: “I want to connect a guitar to my pc”; he or she will be amazed at the varied and easy results they can achieve when they simply start recording guitar on a pc.

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Brad Finley is senior editor of MyGuitarWorkshop - Free Guitar Lessons. Website provides guitar lessons and instructions for all level guitar players. Also click for Free Music Theory Lessons
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Please feel free to publish this article using the author information and the links above.

Guitar Tapping Tips And Techniques
Although made popular recently by Eddie VanHalen, guitar tapping or right hand ‘legatos’ is a technique players have been executing for years. Country players know the benefit of laying down a nice subtle lead and just putting in those quick hammers with clear guitar tapping. And while it’s not the easiest thing, guitar finger tapping techniques are really nothing much more then fast hammer on and a pull offs. Whether you use your middle finger or your first, most times you can hold the pick as usual to execute your guitar tapping and get the speed and positioning essential to good guitar tapping techniques. But like anything else, guitar tapping takes practice and patience.

Since this is a highly specialized, yet popular way of playing we hear a lot of player’s guitar tapping these days…and just as many tapping badly. Especially when a guitar is cranked through distortion, a whole host of extra noises will come out if the player’s guitar finger tapping techniques aren’t the cleanest. An important trick to ‘clean-up’ when you are cranked through that Marshall Stack and you’re in “overdrive”, is to rest the back of your right hand on the lower strings for muting; what you want to avoid is these string making a lot of extra noise while you get that guitar tapping in one steady movement. Of course, if you’re a rock player you are most likely already dreaming of the all-too flashy ‘cross-handed tapping’ but this is so impractical it only ever works when playing live (and even then it is a hard to get those guitar tapping progressions cooking in this way!) Admittedly though, this particular type of guitar tapping, above all other types of guitar finger tapping techniques, creates a truly distinct tone.

There are hundreds of videos and books that show guitar tapping tips, but as it is with everything else, you can’t even begin to understand how guitar tapping works until you get up and do it yourself. Although modern listeners have been conditioned to want speed like Eddie V., it is more important to get the strong and clear sound of each note then to sacrifice technique for potential sloppiness. Guitar finger tapping techniques are only good if you can do them; nothing sounds worse then reaching for a flashy technique and not being able to pull it off. As with everything else you learn on guitar, if you mater a technique on acoustic then you can feel all that more confident trying it on electric.

Playing a difficult and flashy exercise, such as guitar tapping or lightening fast arpeggios, sometimes seem to be easier on an electric; you get-off on the sound you are creating, the noise, but don’t catch nuisances or mistakes. Try tapping on an acoustic guitar (or you want a big challenge-try guitar tapping on an acoustic bass!) Guitar finger tapping is hard on an acoustic; cross-handed guitar tapping is almost impossible (it takes a ton of strength and precision), but master guitar tapping on an acoustic and you’ll find you are that much more prepared for what you might do on your electric.

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Brad Finley is senior editor of MyGuitarWorkshop - Guitar Tips and Music Theory. Website provides guitar lessons and instructions for all level guitar players. Click for more Guitar Tips And Techniques
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Please feel free to publish this article using the author information and the links above.