Hey there, friends! Quick lesson where I walk you through learning the percussive slap-strum technique. This lets you make a percussive thwack! as part of your down-strum motion, by means of muting the strings with your strumming hand. This technique is quite tricky to get the hang of at first, but I have a three-step process I’ll walk you through in this video. I suggest working on each of these steps on their own, as part of your practice routine - and before long you’ll be ready to play this full technique.

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:05 Silencing the Strings Cleanly
• 3:10 Proper Pick Motion
• 4:39 Making the Slap Sound
• 6:27 Example Strum Patterns

Instructional PDF 2 pages

Lesson Discussion

Strumming Examples

Here’s the strumming patterns I show in my video lesson and print-friendly PDF, along with audio examples. In each pattern below, I strum the E major chord at 80bpm (with the exception of patterns 4-5, which are noted below).

Pattern #1

Pattern #2

Pattern #3

Pattern #4A

This is a two measure strumming pattern, meaning we’ll repeat this two measure sequence over and over. Played at 100bpm.

Pattern #4B

And here’s a slight modification of the previous strum, where chop-up-down sequence happens twice before a slight change (to reset things) in the second measure. Notice how this starts identically to the strum above! It’s an example of how much variety we can get through making small rhythmic changes.

Pattern #5

Played at 100bpm. In this example I strum one measure each of E major (x7999x) and A major (577655), repeating over and over.

Other Songs That Use This Strumming Style

Here’s a list of the other songs lessons I’ve made that feature a similar strumming technique:

My Older Video on This Topic

A handful of years back, I originally tackled this same topic - though I didn’t show the helpful point-of-view camera angle. I also used a slightly different step-by-step how-to process that I wanted to teach differently this time around. But if you’re curious to see my older video, check it out below!

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