Strumming Without a Pick

Ukulele strumming lives in your bare hand. The core stroke: point the index finger loosely, brush down across the strings with the nail, and come back up with the fingertip pad. For a mellower sound, strum down with the pad of the thumb instead. Aim where the neck meets the body — not over the soundhole like a guitar — and let the motion come from a rotating wrist, not the whole arm. That spot and that motion are the sweet, chimey uke sound.

Build the engine in three stages against the metronome. First: four even down-strums per bar, counting "1, 2, 3, 4" out loud. Second: keep the hand swinging down-up like a pendulum the whole time and simply miss the strings on the up-strokes — that constant motion is what keeps you in time. Third: catch some up-strokes and you have D-DU-UDU — the island strum, the calypso pattern behind half the ukulele songs ever recorded, and the one the practice routine below is built on.

The strumming guide is written for pick-and-guitar, but its patterns and its keep-the-hand-moving rule transfer to the uke exactly; the strumming trainer will show and sound out any pattern at any tempo (its audio is a guitar, but the rhythm is the lesson). The routine below uses shapes so easy — Am7 needs no fingers at all — that your whole attention stays on the strumming hand, exactly where it belongs.

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