Welcome to this guitar instructions column on how to improve your guitar strumming.
This can be a very frustrating aspect of guitar playing that many beginner students are faced with and I hope to shine some light on the subject.
Acoustic guitar can be a very easy and intuitive instrument to learn to play and strumming is no difference.
The very first thing you need to make sure of before you star working on your strumming technique is that you can change chords with ease.
If you are still straggling with that you cannot really work on your strumming techniques because every chord change you need to stop and brake the groove.
Get your chords sorted out then start working on some strumming patterns.
The way you should go about it is to find a good guitar instructions tutorial and learn some basic strumming patterns.
There are many commonly used patterns that have became part of a good guitar player repertoire and you should try and learn as many as you can.
Just take a pattern at the time, learn it using only one chord and then use it on the songs that you know.
Make sure that you can play the all song using only that one pattern, this might sound a bit mechanical but is a wonderful way of mastering the pattern.
Once you are happy with it move on to the next pattern and repeat the process.
Very soon you will have a large collection of patterns and music will start flowing out of you.
Another reason why you should follow a good guitar instructions tutorial is so that you learn the right techniques when playing these patterns.
If you learn to move your strumming arm the right way you almost insured that you will not loose the beat.
Hope this helps, good luck and happy strumming.