[MUSIC] This video discusses strumming which I think is haft the reason people play guitar, because it's really fun to just sit there and strum and play open chords just feels good. [MUSIC] Whenever you're going to play. So here's the key to strumming. Your hand should not stop moving. So if it feels awkward when you're strumming, that means that there's something going wrong. It should be really smooth. Basically, you should be able to just go down, up, down, up easily and I'm going to play it without any chords. So it should be just. [MUSIC] You notice how my right hand is just really easy, it's relaxed. I'm using gravity to go down. I know that sounds horrible, so let's put some chords with it. And I'm just going to play quarter notes, because that's where you start quarter notes. I'm just going to play one, four, five. So G, C and D and I'm just going to play quarter notes and I'm going to play it four times in a row. Ready, one, two, three, four. [MUSIC] Now if that's too fast and you're thinking, this is ridiculous, I can't do this. This is what you're going to do. You're going to leave the fourth beat off, so you're going to use the fourth beat to switch to the next chord. So it's going to sound like this. One, two, three, switch. Two, three, switch. [MUSIC] Switch. [MUSIC] Switch. [MUSIC] Switch. [MUSIC] And so on and so forth. It's more important that you keep a steady in four fourth time than it is for you to play on every beat. So as long as you keep the beat, it's okay if you only play strum three quarter notes instead of four. Strumming pattern number two involves quarter notes and eighth notes. So we're going to be playing a quarter notes, two eighths and two quarters. So it's going to sound like this. One and two and three, four. You'll notice I went down, down, up, down, down. So you always want to keep a steady down, up movement with this arm. Even if you just have to practice like this and don't play just get use to your arm going like that, because it shouldn't be like. [MUSIC] So we're going to play the second pattern now. Slowly using one, four, five. So it's going to be the same thing. G, C and D. One, two, three and four. And one and two and three, four. One, two and three, four. One, two and three, four. One, two and three, four. One, two and three, four. One, two and three. You'll notice that I'm muting the strings at the end and I'm using this part of my hand to mute the strings, and you don't have to use that. You don't have to slam it down on the strings, because it'll muted out pretty easily. So don't slam your hand down. Make sure that you stay really relaxed in your strumming hand. We're going to play strumming pattern number three now, which is a variation on strumming pattern number two. That sounds like this. [MUSIC] One and two and three, four. One and two and three, four. So I'm going to play that now using one, four, five. Here we go. One and, and three, and four, and. [MUSIC] The final strumming pattern is a pretty common one, it's going to sound like this. One and two, and three, and four. So you'll notice it goes down, down, up, up, down. But don't forget, you have to go down to come up and vice versa. So make sure this is still happening. So you're going to go down, down, up, up, down. And if you're counting that which you should be out loud preferably, one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four. So now we're going to play that with one, four, five. Here we go. One, two, three, four. One, two and three and four. One, two and three and four. One, two and three and four. Again, one, two and three and four. One, two and three and four. One, two and three and four. So you can play through these strumming patterns with open chords or bar chords, either way is fine. We will focus in this video on one, four, five. You also have one, five, four. You also have one, six, four, five. One, five, six, four. So use the different chord progressions that you find in this video and practice all the strumming patterns with them. Be sure to use a metronome and be sure to count out loud, and you'll have in it no time. You can start a band.