Get better with the G, C and D chords with these strumming exercises!

So now that you’ve gone through 3 sets of chord exercises, you’re ready to try doing some strumming patterns with them.  Exercise 1 teaches you the difference in time between quarter notes and eighth notes.  Don’t worry if you have problems making the switch between chords with the 8th notes.  Exercises 2 – 4 are the easiest as you end each measure with a quarter note strum, so it’s similar to the quarter note chord exercise in terms of how much time you have to get from one chord to the next.

In Exercises 5 and 6, you are ending the measure with eighth notes, so you have to do what I call the “open strum trick” to give yourself more time to switch to the next chord.  Basically, after doing the last downstroke, you lift your fingers off of the chord to start moving to the next chord.  Strumming like this is not cheating – this is what all guitar players do.  In the video, I go over some ways to master this trick.

Exercises 7 – 9 get a little bit harder because you do a different strumming pattern on each chord, rather than doing the same strumming patter for both chords like you do in exercises 2 – 6.

Once you have mastered these strumming patterns and can do them reasonably well at 100 – 120 bpm, you’re ready to try learning some songs with the G, C, and D chords.

Some songs to try include:

Redemption Song by Bob Marley

Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison

Lost Boy by Ruth B. (super easy)

Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton

Yellow Submarine by the Beatles

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan

There are other songs like Wonderwall or Closer To Fine that use only G, C, D and other chords of similar difficulty, but those songs are a lot more complicated.  The six songs I listed are probably some of the easiest songs to play once you are good at switching between G, C, and D.