I ran across a fantastic guitar strumming technique from a talented old guitar player in the Northwest. This particular concept came during a short conversation with him at the 1999 Folk Life festival in Seattle.
This is hard to describe but its easy to demonstrate in person. When you look at many old arch-top guitars, you will notice that the pick guard often tends to be shaped in such a way that the fore and aft sections of it drop lower than the middle, creating a shape thats hard to describe. Mabye i can say its dog bone shaped? Anyways, this is mighty convenient, because with the following strumming technique, this pick guard shape will protect your guitar.
To do it, just strum so that the first downstroke passes by the fore section of the guard and then the second downstroke passes by the aft section of the downstroke. As you continue to strum maintain this motion, and you will feel it start to swing.
Its a little magic, but by doing this you create a “natural” pause between beats that creates a swing feel. No longer do you have to artificially create the swing feel by paying attention to the rhythm of the strum.
Normally, straight downstrokes will tend to create a non-swing straight rock beat. To compensate, I notice that when doing it in this fashion I will create a swing feel by flicking my wrist (like putting out a match) at the top of the upstroke. This creates a millisecond tension that creates the swing timing. When I use the fore and aft technique that I describe above, my stroke can be smooth and I don’t need to flick my wrist.
I think this is an important epiphany. I don’t think gypsies use this strumming technique, but I am going to consider incorporating this into my style anyway because its just cool.