The Muted Stroke Strum
In this lesson we’re going to cover a few different rhythm techniques that you can use to make your playing more dynamic and interesting.
The first is the muted stroke strum. The key here is to mute all six strings while still strumming them evenly. I chose bar chords for the progression because they make it easiest to mute, but you can use open chords too, you just need to work a little harder.
Next up we’ll change to wide open half-bar strums. We’ll also slip a slash chord (D/F#) in the mix, giving us a nice little ascending bass line.
In the 11th bar, we chug away on the A, using all downstrokes, on the eighth notes. On the 12th bar, hit that A one last time, then throw a riff in of your choosing.
The one that I demonstrated works off the D chord, 4th and 2nd strings at the 7th fret. Then you can duplicate that on the 5th fret as well.
The other riff I showed used the same notes, but all on the 6th string. Isn’t it cool how you can go two totally different directions with those things?
If you want to take your rhythm playing a whole lot further, checkout my Dynamic Rhythm Guitar course. We work with a lot of different techniques similar to the ones you’ve seen here today, and many, many more!