From a fairly recent email:
Hi! I’m wondering if you can help me….?!
My guitar teacher moved away in the middle of helping me with the song “Darkness, Darkness” by Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods. Â I think the rhythm guitar has an awesome and intriguing sound, hard for me to decipher….but then a lot is hard for me on the guitar!
I think I know the chords – Â Dm, C, G
Is this a song you have ever experimented with? I really want to learn the strumming pattern of this song, the original version. Can you help?Thank you either way! I love your site, found it about a month ago!
Hi!
Thank you for writing. I’m fairly familiar with “Darkness Darkness” although I have to say it’s been over twenty or so years since I’ve played it! And you’re right about the chords being Dm, C and G. I think that the verses (the sung part of them anyway) starts out with eight beats of Dm. It also sounds like during the second four beats that the rhythm guitar changes from Dm to Dsus2, which is made by simply taking your finger off the high E string.
As for the strumming, since it’s a slow-tempo song, the strumming is done in sixteenth notes and is fairly syncopated, meaning that the accents of the strumming are falling between the beats, between the half beats in this case. When strumming sixteenth notes you want the downstrokes to fall on the beats and on the “ands” between the beats. The upstrokes then fall on the sixteenth notes between the eighth notes.
Like most songs, there isn’t so much a “strumming pattern” as there is a “strumming accent pattern.” Meaning that the actual strumming varies but the guitarist still manages to hit the accents in the same places. In this case the strong strumming accents occur on the first beat (downstroke), the last sixteenth note of the first beat (upstroke between “and” and “two”) the “and” between “two” and “three” (downstroke), the sixteenth note between “three” and “and” in the third beat as well between the “and” and four (both upstrokes” and on “four” (downstroke).
I’m hoping this helps. It’s not the easiest thing to explain strictly with text, so here it is written out in rhythmic notation:
Do feel free to write me directly if you have further questions.
I look forward to chatting with you again. And thank you, by the way, for your kind words about Guitar Noise.
Peace