In the past few lessons we have taken a look at some ways to polish up your strumming and make it more expressive. Now we are going to take a look at a simple stylistic technique that will give your strumming a fiery edge. The main idea in this lesson is to interject 32nd note triplet strums into an otherwise standard 16th note strumming pattern. All of the things that we have discussed in the previous lessons on strumming such as relaxing, timing, and dynamics will come in pretty handy when developing this technique.

Adding in quick 32nd note triplet strums occasionally can really add a nice edge to your playing. Try this, make any chord and play a straight 16th note strumming pattern using alternating down and upstrokes. Strum on the “1 y and a 2 y and a 3 y and a 4 y and”. When you get to the “a” of beat four you can try throwing in a quick 32nd note triplet into the strumming pattern. Check out the example for this lesson to see what this strumming patter looks like.

The tricky part to playing stuff like this is not only the speed of the 32nd note triplets but also the fact that you have two downstroke strums in a row when you move from the 16th notes to the 32nd note triplets. If you are new to this kind of quick strumming you will probably want to start out very slowly to make sure that your playing is even and in time.

Quick 32nd note triplet strums like this are a great little weapon to put some fire into your playing. If you are wise about where you use this kind of idea it can be very effective and impressive. Enjoy this idea and try to work it into your playing sometime this week.

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