Strumming patterns are written as strings of letters — D - D U - U D U — and the letters leave out the only thing that makes them work. The hand never stops. It swings down on every beat and up on every “and” in between, at a steady rate, forever. A dash does not mean pause. It means the hand keeps swinging and misses the strings.
Once that is in the wrist, every pattern below is the same pattern with different strings touched. Beginners who try to execute the letters — down, stop, down, up, stop — end up with a hand that stutters, and no amount of practice fixes it, because the thing being practiced is wrong.
Ukulele Aerobics — Chad Johnson, Hal Leonard
A 40-week, one-lick-a-day program with online audio, and the audio is the part that matters: a strumming problem is a timing problem, and timing is fixed by playing along with something, not by reading. 88 pages. Hal Leonard lists it at $22.99.
Count it, and the notation explains itself
A bar of 4/4 has four beats. Between each beat there is an “and.” Say it out loud: one and two and three and four and. That is eight slots, and a strumming hand covers all eight — down on the numbers, up on the ands — whether or not it touches the strings on any given one.
Write a pattern against those eight slots and it stops being a code. Here is the most-played ukulele strum in the world, laid out the way it is actually played:
| Count | 1 | & | 2 | & | 3 | & | 4 | & |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hand | ↓ | ↑ | ↓ | ↑ | ↓ | ↑ | ↓ | ↑ |
| Strings | ↓ | — | ↓ | ↑ | — | ↑ | ↓ | ↑ |
The top row is what the arm does and it never changes. The bottom row is the pattern. The two misses — the “and” of one, and beat three — are where the syncopation comes from, and they are the reason the pattern sounds like a record rather than a metronome.
Practice it as three separate things, in this order. Strum all eight slots until the arm is even. Then keep strumming all eight and just say which two you are about to skip. Then lift the hand off the strings on those two without changing anything else. That third step is the whole skill, and it takes minutes rather than weeks once the first two are solid.
That one has a name, and it is the one you came for
It is the island strum. Kala — which sells more first ukuleles in the United States than anyone — calls it “broadly regarded as the most classic and popular strum pattern in the world of ukulele,” says it came out of Hawaiian music, and names four songs built on a variation of it: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Riptide,” “Hey Soul Sister,” and Twenty One Pilots’ “The Judge.”
If you learn one pattern and stop, learn that one. It will carry most of a campfire songbook on its own, and three of those four songs are among the first things anybody wants to play on the instrument.
The patterns worth having, and what each one is for
Read the middle column the same way as the table above: the hand covers all eight slots, and the arrows are only where it touches the strings.
| Pattern | 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & | Use it for | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| All downs | ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ | Anything, while you learn the chord changes. Never a wasted choice | First hour |
| Down-up | ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ | Getting the arm even. This is the drill every other pattern is built on | First hour |
| Basic rock | ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ | Pop and rock. Kala rates it for simplicity and for how much variation it takes | Week one |
| Island strum | ↓ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↑ | The default. Hawaiian in origin, and now most of the ukulele repertoire | Week one |
| Swing / shuffle | ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ uneven: long-short | Jazz, blues, reggae. Kala notes it lingers on the down to get the groove | Week two |
| Off-beat (reggae) | ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ | Reggae and ska. The beats themselves are silent, which is the point | Week two |
| Chuck on 2 and 4 | ↓ ↑ × ↑ ↓ ↑ × ↑ | Anything that wants a backbeat. × is a damped strum, not a missed one | Month one |
| Waltz (3/4) | ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ six slots, not eight | Waltzes and anything counted in three | Week two |
Kala’s own core set is four: island, swing, basic rock, and the hula pattern, which developed alongside the instrument and is the foundation of the dance. Four is about right, and a longer list is worth less than it looks — most entries on any thirteen-pattern chart are the island strum with one slot moved, and learning them separately teaches you nothing you did not already have.
Where to strum, and why the answer moves with the size
Not over the soundhole. That is where a guitarist’s hand lands, and on a ukulele it is loud and glassy.
The reason is where the strings are being disturbed, and it is measurable. Plucking a string at a point one-nth of the way along suppresses its nth harmonic — the physics group at the University of New South Wales demonstrates it with a test anyone can run on a guitar: pluck the low E anywhere except a third of the way along and the B string, tuned near its third harmonic, starts to ring on its own; pluck it exactly at the third and it stays quiet. Strum close to the bridge and you are at a small fraction of the string, exciting the high harmonics hard and the fundamental barely, which is the thin, tinny sound. Move toward the middle of the string and the fundamental takes over.
The middle of the string is easy to find, because it is a fixed point on every fretted instrument ever built: the 12th fret. An octave is half the string, so the 12th fret sits at exactly half the scale length, and the fullest, roundest strum is over or just past it.
That is why the old advice — strum where the neck meets the body — works on some ukuleles and drifts on others. Take Kala’s own published measurements for one model in three sizes:
| Size | Scale length | Frets | Halfway point (12th fret) | Where the fretboard ends |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soprano (KA-15S) | 13⅝″ | 12 | About 6.8″ from the nut | At the 12th — the midpoint exactly |
| Concert (KA-15C) | 14⅞″ | 18 | About 7.4″ from the nut | Six frets past the midpoint |
| Tenor (KA-15T) | 16.97″ | 18 | About 8.5″ from the nut | Six frets past the midpoint |
On a soprano the fretboard stops dead at the midpoint, so “the end of the fretboard” and “the sweet spot” are the same place and the advice is exact. On a concert or a tenor the board runs six frets past it and out over the body, so following the same instruction puts your hand noticeably closer to the bridge and brighter than it needs to be. Slide back up the neck an inch or so and the instrument thickens up.
None of which makes one spot correct. It makes it a control you can reach for: forward for cut and clarity in a noisy room, back over the 12th for warmth when you are singing over it.
The wrist does the work
The motion is a rotation of the forearm and a hinge at the wrist, not a swing from the elbow or the shoulder. An elbow-driven strum is slow, heavy and impossible to keep even at eight slots a bar; a wrist-driven one can run all night.
Three details, in the order they matter:
- Loose fist, index finger out. The pad and nail of the index finger cross the strings — nail on the way down, pad on the way up. Some players rest the thumb against the index finger for support, which firms it up at the cost of a little speed.
- Do not dig. Four nylon strings under low tension do not need force, and pressing into them is what produces the thumping, uneven sound most beginners are actually complaining about.
- Down and up should sound different, and that is fine. The down stroke starts on the low G string and the up stroke starts on the high A, so they have different weights. Trying to make them identical is a waste of a month.
The “chuck” is two different techniques
The percussive click written as × gets called chnk, chuck or chunk, and the confusion is that there are two ways to make it and they live in different hands.
The fretting-hand mute is the one to learn first. Relax the fingers already on the chord so they stay touching the strings but stop pressing them to the frets, and strum normally. Out comes a click with no pitch. The strumming hand does nothing new at all, which is why it works on the first attempt.
The strumming-hand chuck is the harder one and the one that sounds like a record. On the down stroke the fleshy edge of the hand lands on the strings at the same moment the finger crosses them, so the chord is struck and killed in one motion. It has to be one motion; strumming and then damping gives you a chord with a full stop after it, which is a different noise.
Both are worth having. Put one on beats two and four of the down-up drill and the ukulele suddenly has a drummer in it.
What is worth buying
Very little, and none of it is an instrument. Strumming is a rhythm problem, and rhythm problems are solved by a clock and a program to follow.
Ukulele Aerobics for All Levels — Chad Johnson
- Hal Leonard, 88 pages, 9″ × 12″
- 40 weeks, one lick per day, seven days a week
- Online audio access code for every workout in the book
- Covers strumming, fingerstyle, legato and staccato, hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, damping, vibrato and tremolo
- Styles: pop, rock, folk, old-time, blues, jazz, reggae
- Publisher’s list price $22.99
- Around $18
- The audio is the point — playing along is what fixes timing, and reading a pattern never will
- A day is a few minutes, which is the only practice schedule anybody keeps
- Damping and muting get proper coverage rather than a paragraph
- It runs past beginner, so it does not become useless in March
- A workout book, not a songbook — there are no complete songs in it
- Standard notation and tab together; if you read neither, expect a slower start
- The later weeks are genuinely advanced and will sit unused for a while
Korg MA-2 Digital Metronome
- Tempo 30–252 bpm, accurate to ±0.02%
- 0–9 beats per bar
- Quarter notes, eighths, triplets and sixteenths as click subdivisions
- Pendulum step, full step and tap tempo
- 3.5 mm headphone jack; reference tone C4–B4
- 68 g, 3.94″ × 2.36″, about 400 hours on two AAA alkalines
- Around $20
- Set it to eighth notes and there is a click under every slot in the patterns above — the notation stops being abstract
- Korg redesigned the buzzer to be heard over the instrument, which is the one thing a quiet metronome fails at
- Tap tempo means you can find the speed of a record you are trying to play along with
- The headphone jack keeps the click out of a recording, and out of the room
- Your phone will also make a clicking noise for free — what you are buying is a dial for subdivisions and a device that is not your phone
- No tuner in it; that is the TM series, and costs more
- The buzzer is a buzzer, not a woodblock. Nobody enjoys the sound
BoloPick Felt Ukulele Picks, 6-pack
- Wool felt, 3 mm thick, standard 351 guitar-pick outline
- Six picks, mixed colors; also sold in 8 and 12
- Made in the USA; washable and reusable
- 4.6★ across more than 3,500 ratings
- Around $7
- A guitar pick on nylon strings is loud and clicky; felt takes the click out and leaves the chord
- Cheap enough that losing them does not matter, which is the actual failure mode of picks
- Thick enough to hold properly, unlike the thin celluloid most people already own
- Felt is not the only answer. Kala’s own branded pick is a 0.60 mm Dunlop Tortex, which Kala describes as designed with ukulele and nylon strings in mind — so what matters is thin or soft, not felt specifically
- You lose attack and note definition, which is the wrong trade for fingerpicking
- Most ukulele playing is done with bare fingers, and a pick is optional forever
Eyeshot Double J-Hook Ukulele Strap
- Two J-hooks — no strap button, no drilling
- Adjustable 33.3″ to 52.1″, 1.57″ wide
- Jacquard fabric with a doubled leather shoulder pad
- Fits soprano through baritone
- Around $16
- Standing without one, the fretting hand is holding the instrument up as well as fretting — and a fretting hand doing two jobs is what makes a strumming hand tense
- The J-hooks clip to the soundhole, so nothing has to be fitted to the instrument
- Long enough to sit properly on a tenor or baritone, which many uke straps are not
- Sitting down with a soprano you do not need one at all
- The hooks rest against the soundhole edge, so a high-gloss finish wants a check now and then
- Fabric, not leather — it is a $16 strap and looks like one up close
| What | Fixes | Price band | Buy it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ukulele Aerobics | Having patterns and no plan | Around $18 | Once the chord changes are clean |
| Korg MA-2 | Speeding up, dragging, uneven bars | Around $20 | Straight away — it is the first one |
| Felt picks | A hard, clicky attack | Around $7 | Only if you have tried fingers and want more volume |
| Clip-on strap | A fretting hand doing two jobs | Around $16 | The first time you stand up to play |
If the instrument itself is fighting you, that is a different page: our guide to choosing a ukulele covers the sizes, and the beginner instruments worth buying covers the nut and saddle, which is what decides whether a cheap ukulele plays in tune. If it just sounds dull, it is probably the strings. There is more choice than one strap on our ukulele strap guide.
Questions people actually ask
How long before strumming stops sounding stiff?
Days for the arm, weeks for the changes. An even down-up at a slow tempo is a single afternoon. What takes longer is keeping it even while the other hand moves to a new chord, and that is a chord-change problem wearing a strumming problem’s clothes. The fix is to keep strumming through the change even if the chord arrives late and sounds wrong — stopping the hand to get the fingers down is the habit that has to be broken. More on the shape of the first month in is the ukulele easy to learn.
Fingers, thumb or a pick?
Fingers, for almost everything. The index finger alone covers the whole repertoire above, and it is what nearly every ukulele player uses nearly all of the time. The thumb on its own is softer and slower and suits quiet down-strums behind a voice. A pick is for volume — playing outdoors, or with a guitar in the room — and it should be a soft one.
Why does my up-strum sound weak?
Usually because it is traveling too far. A down-stroke naturally crosses all four strings; an up-stroke only needs to catch the top two or three to do its job, and reaching all the way back across on every one makes the hand late for the next beat. Shorten it. It is meant to be lighter than the down.
Do I have to learn to read strumming notation?
No, and it is worth knowing what the symbols mean anyway because every songbook uses them. D is down and U is up. A dash is a slot where the hand keeps moving and misses the strings. An × is a damped, percussive strum. A capital letter, where the rest are lower case, means play that one harder.
Should I use the same pattern for a whole song?
To begin with, yes. One pattern held steady for three minutes sounds far better than three patterns applied nervously. Once it is automatic, the usual move is to strip back rather than add — all downs in a verse, the full pattern in a chorus — because the difference between the two is what an audience hears as dynamics.
Is strumming different on a tenor or a baritone?
The patterns are identical. What changes is where the sweet spot sits relative to the fretboard, as the table above shows, and how much string there is to cross — a tenor’s 16.97″ scale takes a slightly wider sweep than a soprano’s 13⅝″. A baritone is tuned D–G–B–E rather than G–C–E–A, which changes the chord shapes and nothing about the strumming hand. Concert against tenor goes into the sizes.
The short version
Keep the hand moving on all eight slots and skip the ones the pattern skips. Learn the island strum and one damped variation, and you have the ukulele repertoire. Strum over the end of the fretboard rather than the soundhole, from the wrist, without digging in. Then put a metronome on and do it every day for a month, which is the part nobody wants to hear and the only part that works.