Which Strings to Play on Electric Guitar

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Tom. This is for expertvillage.com. We're talking about shortcuts to playing the electric guitar. We've talked about, and I've shown you four bar chords. You've probably noticed that I'm not always strumming all the notes on my guitar. Even though that's an E bar chord that we've learned; when I'm playing it; especially if you're playing rock and roll, or you're playing rhythm; so you're not playing a lead, but you're actually playing the chording that goes along with the sound. When you're playing rock, a lot of guitars are only covering maybe three strings. Part of that is you may be using a little bit of distortion on your guitar, or some kind of effect, and you don't want it too muddy, so if I'm playing an E bar chord. You hear very few people playing all the strings. Usually (and I'll start with the E bar) I'll just play these bottom two strings, or maybe the bottom three. Rock and roll is pretty careless, so I'll shoot for the bottom two; sometimes I'll hit that third one. My picking pattern; as you notice; all I'm doing is just leaving my wrist very loose, and I'm just one, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So, I'm just almost making it very, very loose with the wrist motion; then I'm just hitting those bottom two strings. The other thing I'm doing too; if you notice, is with this fleshy part of my hand; I'm just laying it on the string so it deadens it out a bit. That way you don't get the ringing. So, here's with it ringing, and sometimes that's an effective way to strum your guitar, and sometimes; if you let your hand rest back there by the bridge; you get more of that rock and roll sound. There's an A bar. Now, on the A bar; same thing. I'm only playing two strings, and I am missing; remember that bottom one? There's without that hand hanging on it there. So that's one way to strum."