Long Road Strumming

hawkeye8388

I am relatively new to the guitar and have some issues figuring out strumming patterns. Long Road appears to be one of the easiest PJ songs to learn and sounds good on an acoustic.

Is the strumming pattern a simple DUDU? I just want to get it right before practicing it wrong and then having to re-learn it.

Thanks for the help!

mccreadyisgod

When I play Long Road, I usually play it by strumming the full D-major chord the first time, and then just plucking the D string in 1/8th note repeats for two measures, and repeat. There is some nuance there, not every 1/8th note gets a D. For lack of a better way to describe it, this is what you play every 1/8th note for two measures:

Strum - D - D - D - hold - D - D -D | D - D - D - D - hold - D - D - D

You can notice that the 5th 1/8th note of every measure is a pause, or hold, where you don't pluck or strum, but rather just let the previous note ring out a note longer. You can see this easier by listening to the CD and counting out the 1/8th notes, i.e. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.

You can cheat the song a little by using a D-major with the old favorite strum pattern, D-DU-UDU. That is, on every 1/8th note, it's:

Down - hold - Down - Up - hold - Up - Down - Up

If you're not comfortable switching from a full chord to just the single note, then this would be the easier way to play it. You can use this strum pattern through the entire song, just switching chords for the chorus and bridge parts.

I'm probably just making things worse, I don't know why I even try...