How to Strum Smoothly on Ukulele

In this video we’ll look at how to strum smoothly on ukulele. The key is all in your forearm rotation.

Often when people are first learning to strum, they strum entirely from the elbow. This kind of motion is going to tire your hand out quickly as well as slow you down.

Instead, we want to use forearm rotation to strum smoothly on the ukulele. So imagine you’re opening and closing a door with your hand, rotating your forearm back and forth. Make it a quick motion back and forth. It’s almost like shaking your arm to wake it up when it falls asleep. This is exactly the quick kind of rotation we want when learning to strum on ukulele.

Strumming Exercise

For technical practice, first, lay your left-hand fingers flat on the fingerboard to mute the strings. To get the best sound out of your strums, be sure to strum where the body and neck meet on the ukulele. Now, secondly, we’ll work on making down and up strums with the index finger in the right hand using this same quick forearm rotation. It’s important that it’s a quick motion. Think about snapping your fingers. If you do it slowly, you get no sound. But when you speed up the motion you get a nice snap. It’s the same with strumming on ukulele: like a snap up and down.

Let the tip joint of the index finger be nice and loose. Like the needle of a record player the index finger can bend toward the strings — let the other fingers extend as you do so. Then start rotating your forearm to create those down and up motions with the index finger.

Rhythmic strumming

To take this to the next level, let’s try building in some rhythms to our strums. To start off, let’s play even eighth notes with each down and up strum. 1 (down)-and (up), 2 (down)-and (up), 3 (down)-and (up), 4 (down)-and (up). Once that is really comfortable, cut it in half and try sixteenth notes. 1-e-and-uh, 2-e-and-uh, and so on. Again, we can add some other rhythmic variations here, but once the sixteenths are comfortable, let’s try a tremolo strum. Here we just move back and forth very quickly with no particular rhythm in mind. We’re just focusing on control and being very relaxed, using that forearm motion. This relaxed but controlled motion is the key to strum smoothly on ukulele.

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We hope you enjoyed that technique tip on how to strum smoothly on ukulele! You can get much more content on ukulele technique at our Technique Resources page here. And we have many more technique lessons for our members at Ukulele Corner Academy. Join Ukulele Corner Academy today!