Strumming



Palm Slaps

A more percussive strum in tapping and in acoustic guitar playing in general is when the slap your palm or the side of your hand to the strings to make a beat sound in between playing. This will deceive the listener into think that it is more than one instrument and also give a sense of beat and rhythm. What you will want to do is use the open hand method of strumming and every (chosen) beat you will slap your palm to the guitar strings, the strings will hit the frets and cause a percussive sound.
Try doing this exercise:
Tuning:(DADGAD)



Play this all as quarter notes, eighth notes (or) all the same note duration, while playing count "1 and 2 and..." in order to keep beat. This rhythm is very deceptive and will not sound as if each note is the same duration due to the upstrokes, downstrokes and palm rests.

Accents

Accenting notes is an important role in rhythm structure and beat keeping. The notation for an accented note is > which purely means just beat those strings, or hit the strings a bit harder. An accent usually comes on a down beat but you can have where ever you want.
Here is an exercise:
Tuning DADGAD:

Still pretty basic we just start out playing 1 quarter note 4 eighth notes, after you repeat that three times end on a big 3 quarter note and 1 hangout note cadence (make sure you let the last note ring out). The accents come in on the beginning of each measure and at the 4 quarter note ending.