Guitar Basics: Strumming an Electric Guitar Strumming means dragging a pick (or the fingers) across the strings of the guitar. You drag the guitar pick in a downward motion (toward the floor) to sound the chords formed by the left hand, but you don't try to do anything except sound the chords. In doing even that, however, you create rhythm. If you "pick-drag" in regular, even strokes, one per beat, adhering to a tempo (musical rate), you're strumming the guitar in rhythm. And that's music, whether you mean it to be or not. More specifically, you're strumming a quarter-note rhythm, which is fine for songs such as the Beatles' "Let It Be," and other ballads. For the record, strumming an E chord in quarter notes looks like the notation in Figure 1. Note that rhythm slashes are used to show that you should play the entire chord, as opposed to note heads (which indicate only a single pitch). Figure 1: Playing an E chord in one bar of fo...
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