This might sound painful, and it can be if you pull down on the guitar while holding the neck, but some people love it. Your ultimate goal is to have the guitar hanging from your neck, and resting either right under or against the top of your chest. If you want to stay seated but would rather go Ukulele style, you should take off the guitar and tighten up the shoulder strap a bit. Real guitarists normally rest their axe on the leg closest to their strumming arm, but this is a miniature plastic imitation, so you should put it on whatever leg you're most comfortable with. As you're holding your instrument, you'll notice that there's a curved indentation on both sides, and you want to rest this curve on your leg. Your good hand (e.g., if you're right-handed, it's your right) should be in the area of the strum bar, while your other hand is supporting the neck (where the fret buttons are located). When you sit down, make sure you're comfortably upright. Pretending you're playing a real guitar while seated is one method, and you should have a stool or armless chair to try it out on. Different people play different ways, and here's a few you can try out. It comes with a shoulder strap, and its use is recommended, especially while you're trying to find out a comfortable way to hold on.
With those new-fangled drums out of the way, we're going to move on to the pretty plastic guitar you finished unpacking. If it helps, watch someone play a real guitar and notice how their lower arm and wrist moves, and come up with your own style of mimicry. The moral of this story: don't forget to rely on the other parts of your arm, too. Relying entirely on your fingers is natural, but can quickly lead to cramping and fatigue. No matter which way you hit that bar, there are various ways you can pour power into it. You won't need to alt-strum on every single note, but it's useful for very repetitive sections. This is called "alt-strumming," which stands for "alternating strumming." This is as close to real-life guitaring as hitting that bar is going to get, and will carry you through every difficulty in the game. Specifically, you'll be holding the thin plastic area of the bar in-between your pointer and thumb fingers, and strumming down then up (or up then down, if that's your thing) to hit the gems.
It's also more challenging, but it pays off in the long run. Holding onto the slim area of the strum bar like a guitar pick is another and more advanced method, and this is an excellent one to learn. This lets you rest your palm against the body, and enables using the Select button for Star Power activation (which we'll get to later). On Easy and Medium, it's rather forgiving, but it requires endurance and a lightning-quick yet feather-light touch on higher difficulties. Every time you hit a note, you'll need to strum that bar like a real guitar's strings, and there's more than one way to do it.Ī lot of people rest their thumb against the top of the strum bar and press down whenever they need to strike a chord, and some get away with doing this forever.