Strumming & Picking

Knowing the chord shapes doesn't automatically get a song sounding right — your strumming or picking hand does most of that work, and it's the part beginners practice least deliberately. The Strumming and Picking tools, reached from their own tiles in the Practice Hub, isolate that one skill: pick a named pattern, choose a chord to play it over, and loop it until your hand stops thinking about it.

Strum patterns

The strum library holds patterns you've probably heard before, even if you never learned their names: Steady Downs, Campfire, Pop Ballad, Punk Downs, Shuffle Feel, Reggae Skank. Each one shows as a down/up/rest notation strip across a single bar, so you're reading the rhythm instead of guessing at it from a video. The list runs easiest first — if you don't know where to start, start at the top.

Fingerpicking patterns

The picking library covers the same ground for fingerstyle: named rolls, each one showing exactly which string and which finger plucks on every beat. It's built for players moving from strumming into fingerpicking for the first time, where the usual instruction — pick the strings individually — isn't much use without knowing which finger goes where.

Playing a pattern

Tap a pattern and it opens in the player, looping that one bar over a chord you pick from eight common shapes. Open the trainer from a song page's suggested strum instead, and the chord picker is skipped — the player loads with that song's actual first chord already selected, so you're drilling the pattern you'll actually use, not a stand-in.

A count-in gives you one bar to get your hand in position before the loop starts. Tempo is a slider you set yourself, with a speed up gradually toggle alongside it.