This image is the cover for the book Strumming the Guitar, Strumming the Guitar

Strumming the Guitar, Strumming the Guitar

Strumming the Guitar Book 1 is a detailed course for beginners and upward, focusing solely on the subject of guitar strumming. Separate sections take on strumming, changing chords and coordinating chord changes while strumming, therefore maintaining a thorough approach throughout with components broken down at every level. With this incremental method, this guitar strumming book enables beginners to absorb everything important from the start and progress consistently as the difficulty level increases.

Guitar Strumming Techniques - Before anything else, the basics of strumming are covered from the ground up, assisted with professional hand drawn illustrations. Learn how to hold the plectrum for strumming, how to strum chords that require you to miss certain strings, pre-emptive chord changing, open strums and more.

Guitar Strumming Patterns - 70 different guitar strumming patterns that can be used throughout the book, all written with easy to understand, graphical, strumming diagrams.

Rhythmical Notation - Understand the common language of music by becoming familiar with rhythmical notation. Learn whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, their equivalent rests, dotted notes, ties and the basics of time signatures. All shown with clear charts and diagrams.

Chord Changes - Seven groups of chord changes, made up almost entirely of open chords. The book starts with the easiest chord changes in which fretting finger locations can be shared and works up to more difficult chord changes where fretting fingers need to relocate in independent directions.

Strumming Exercises and Study Pieces - Every section includes strumming exercises that combine chord changes with strumming, each section concluding with a musical study piece using the skills learnt in styles of Slow Pop, Spanish style, Grunge and Country Pop. In total there are 85 strumming exercises and 10 musical study pieces, while more combinations can be found by selecting from the 70 given strumming patterns to use with them.

Audio and Video - All exercises and musical study pieces are demonstrated with audio (downloadable 154 MB). All study pieces have a backing track for you to play over. Online videos (21 in total size of 775 MB) are also used to enhance explanations.

Please Note: The eBook includes musical pieces so is not suitable for smaller screens.

Gareth Evans

Gareth started learning guitar at age 8 and by age 10 was playing guitar in the orchestral pit with the teachers for school plays playing guitar chords like Dom 9th, diminished and major 7th. At age 13 he achieved grade 5 classical guitar with honours. Later on Distinction at higher diploma level from the Academy of Contemporary music, grade 8 Electric guitar (RGT), grade 8 Electric guitar (RSL), grade 8 Contemporary Music Theory (LCM) and grade 8 Bass Guitar (RSL). He has his own guitar tuition practice where many of his students keep coming for years.

Understanding the needs of his students 1-1 helps decide what content to write in his Guitar Books. He decided there where ways things could be done differently, such as his “Guitar for Kids” book that doesn’t focus on sight-reading and uses mostly guitar tablature (like most guitar method books do) or “Chords for Guitar” rather than giving you 1000’s of guitar chords, gives you shapes for various chord types that you can move up and down the fret-board.