Reggae Strumming & Rhythm, Explained

In today’s lesson I’ll give you an introduction to playing reggae guitar, guiding you through strumming & rhythm skills needed to get up to speed with this style of music. What I teach will work with an acoustic or electric guitar, and likewise will help whether or not you’re able to play barre chords. In addition to showing you the must-know reggae techniques, I’ll demonstrate these using a few different popular songs — giving you some fun things to practice along the way. Let’s get into it!

• 0:00 Overview
• 0:29 Accenting the Off-Beat
• 2:58 Muting Chord Strums
• 5:14 Adding Down-Up Strums
• 5:51 Song - Red Red Wine
• 7:33 Song - Three Little Birds
• 9:12 Song - Santeria (fingerstyle)
• 10:51 Play-Along Practice Tracks

Instructional PDF 4 pages

Lesson Discussion

Reggae Drum Beat Practice Track

Here’s a video practice track which repeats the audio of a 4-count drum beat, played in a reggae style. On screen, you see the current beat highlighted — along with visual indications of where your off-beat strumming should go. You can play any chords you want over this, and it’ll sound good!

I also have an audio version of the same drum track, played at three different speeds: slow, medium, and fast. You can play these directly on this page (below), or likewise you can download the audio files and save them for offline use.

Song-Specific Practice Tracks

“Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley

By Bob Marley. This is a wonderful beginner-friendly song to learn in general, whether or not you want to play using a reggae rhythm. My video below shows me slowly strumming the chords (A, D, E) in a reggae style, with tabs on screen so you can follow along. Listen to Bob’s version on Youtube if you want to reference his official recording.

“Red Red Wine” by UB40

I’m tackling this song with just three chords (C, F, G) — which I’m playing with a capo on 1st fret. For the F and G chords, I’m using a three-string triad voicing which makes it a bit easier to control the string muting. Note, the second time I play through things – I follow the exact same rhythm but add the 5th string to my voicing of F (x3321x) and G (x5543x)… which is not shown in the tabs. Listen to UB40’s recording on YouTube, if you want to reference how they play it.

“Santeria” by Sublime

While this song is normally in the Key of E (no capo), I’m approaching it with a capo 4 arrangement (using Key of C chords). This simplifies the chord shapes we’ll use, as to relying on barre chords. I’m also playing fingerstyle, to demonstrate how you can indeed embrace the reggae rhythm without a pick. For each chord, I’m plucking each the bass note on the quarter notes — and then doing a puncuated strum of strings 4-3-2 with my index, middle, and ring fingers (respectively). Listen to Sublime’s recording on YouTube if you want to hear them play it… note how the reggae rhythm kicks in during each verse (and then subsides in the chorus, to make room for the lead guitar).

My Other Strumming Tutorials

Check out strumming & rhythm page to see all of my lessons on this topic! Here’s a few of the related techniques I mention in this lesson:

Other Teachers Explaining Reggae

Adrian from Anyone Can Play Guitar gives my favorite overview of things. He doesn’t pretend to be a life-long reggae player, but has clearly done his homework.

Brian from Active Melody likewise has a good explanation of reggae. I particularly like what he explains around 6:05, where he shows how his strumming hand is always in motion – and does a light (muted) strum on the thicker strings on the quarter notes. You can see me do this exact thing in my playthrough videos above.

Mike from Mike Barne Drums gives this quick explanation of the “one drop” drum groove — which lends itself incredibly well to reggae. This is the percussive style I’m using in my drum practice track further up on this page.

Finally, here’s Tuff Lion explaining things. This video is a bit disjointed (with some edits at strange times), but I enjoy hearing his broad explanation given his long-time experience with reggae music. He describes the role of the guitarist as a “harmonic percussionist” — harmonic because you’re playing chords, and percussionist because of the punctuated sound of the strum (also known as the chop, skank, bang, hit, etc). This is not the first video on this topic I’d recommend (because of the lack of graphics, how fast it moves, etc) – but it’s absolutely worth checking out if you’re curious.