The No-Wah Strumming Pattern

No wah pedal? No problem! Here's a fun pattern that uses Gypsy-style strumming technique to simulate the sound of a wah pedal. You start with a downstroke that strikes the top two or three strings, followed by an upstroke that only strikes the high E string – to get the wah "click". The third motion is a downstroke that taps your index finger nail on the lowest strings, approximately E or A, or some mix of the two. Then you repeat. This creates a DUD-DUD-DUD pattern, which is similar to patterns the Gypsies use when picking three-note-per-string scales. Because of the repeated downstroke it's not perfectly efficient, so there will be a speed limit. But you can still do it fast enough to get the wah effect. It's a bit of a tongue twister, and like many things in guitar picking, in order to learn this, you have to fool around with it at fast speeds first, to get a sense of what it feels like when it loops. Since this is a pattern of threes being played as sixteenth notes, it doesn't divide evenly into a bar. To loop it, I do the first beat a little differently — a chord stab for three sixteenths, followed by an uptroke. Then, to fill out the rest of the bar, just do four repetitions of the pattern. When the next downbeat arrives, you'll still have to do two downstrokes in a row to get the chord stab.