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The Open Chord Strumming Lesson Program will help you to get comfortable with a variety of strumming and bass-down strumming patterns.
These lessons use seven different open chord shapes in the left-hand. These seven open chord shapes are matched into 16 different chord pairs, using different strum patterns in the right hand. This series focuses on just three basic movements in the right-hand.
We start with a very simple three-down right-hand strum pattern over each of these 16 changes. You want to make sure that you can play along in real-time with these videos. If you have any problems with the left-hand chord changes, go back to the open chord exercises in the beginners lesson series (Lessons 1 - 35). Also, be sure and use the left hand still techniques that we talk about throughout these lessons.
From the three-down strum patterns we move to a five-strum pattern, three down and two up. There are 48 of these five-strum exercises at three different tempos. It's a good idea to spend a little time on these. From there, we go on to exercises that use seven consecutive down / up strums, and then 13 consecutive down / up strums.
The next section in this program focuses on bass / down patterns. These lessons expand on the bass / down patterns for open chords that we saw in lessons 13 and 14 in the Beginners Lesson Program. Lesson 13 demonstrates single bass / down strumming over one chord, and lesson 14 demonstrates a double bass /down strum pattern over one chord. Review lessons 13 and 14 if you have any problems with the lessons in this section. Lessons 57 to 64 focus on bass / down / up strum patterns over alternating chord pairs.
