A 6:8 Strumming Pattern

I had been searching for a good song to practice 6:8 timing, and recently found:

Ain’t Met Us Yet - Matt Cooper

It is a lovely song, and while impossible to sing (for me) it is pretty easy to play! It uses only G, D, Em, C so it is perfect for me in grade 1 :slight_smile: Just leaving it out here in case anyone else is looking for a nice 6:8 song that is not too fast

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Hey here I’m again, I’m redoing the course and now it’s almost time for this lesson. I’ll remake my question regarding the dynamics and variations on 6/8 time. Should I need to be practice applying variations and dynamics at all ? It seems to be something to worry further.

It won’t hurt you to start working on it now :wink:
At this stage, it’s certainly ok to keep it simple. In 6:8 for example, just play all down strums, emphasising the 1 and 4. Play around a bit with different dynamics, e.g. in 4:4, all down strums, emphasise only 1, then 1 and 3, gradually decrease emphasis from 1 to 4, … It will set you up for greater things along your learning path.

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Thank you, although I didn’t understand this part :sweat_smile:

Also, dynamics has to do “mainly” with loud and soft, right? :thinking:

Hi, what do you meant with this?

What I meant is: play just down strums on all 4 beats. Then play around with putting more accent on one or more beats (i.e., play them a bit harder/louder, indeed): accent only beat 1 and play the other 3 the ‘normal’ way, accent beats 1 and 3 and play beats 2 and 4 the ‘normal’ way, gradually decrease the ‘loudness’ from beat 1 to beat 4 (play beat 1 harder, beat 2 a bit less, beat 3 again a bit less, and beat 4 the quietest), …

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Well thanks for replying :slightly_smiling_face:

Not sure, it was almost 2 years ago :grinning_face:

Actually, I think I was just saying once you have learned the pattern in the lesson, including the accents on beats 1 and 4, you can then try to vary it to your liking: accenting different beats, adding some upstrums, etc. Nothing more than that.

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Fair enough :joy:

Hi there! Does this applies to all time signatures? 4/4, 3/4… Keeping the accents no matter the variations or dynamics?

The accent on 1 and 4 is for 6/8 time.

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I know, I’m not asking that :sweat_smile:

Well it seemed to me you were. So what are you asking.

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Renan is asking whether each time signature has its own fixed ‘points of accent’.

@RenanRischiotto, in different time signatures you can accent different beats, there’s no fixed beat to accent for each and every time signature, and it can even be different from measure to measure.

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Well now I’m confused :sweat_smile:

Just follow the course :wink:

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In the course Justin teaches that time signatures have fixed accents (at least yet, in Grade 1 Module 6, moving soon to 7) but that wasn’t even my original question.

For this exercise put an accent on beats 1 and 4. Just practice that for now. There are many other variations but you can leave that for now. Just get the basic skill to begin with.

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Alright I give up.

Something is lost in translation?