When you are playing there should be the ability to show both the strumming pattern and the chord.
If there’s no room to display both, there should be a way to change between the two displays without stopping the song.
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Hi Cameron, and it is very good to meet you and welcome to a great community. I am not sure about your question. Is this on the app or the Justin site, and what song? You will receive a lot of help very soon, I’m sure. Cheers HEC
Hi Cameron, good to see ya around here.
Guess I’d ask where you are in your learning guitar journey?
Beginner? Intermediate? etc.
I do find it hard to answer your question too.
fwiw, I’ve been playing a while, but I’m no pro by any sense of the word. However I do make the change your talking about. I do it w/o thinking about it.
I know the chords I want to play and change between them w/o much thought. When I was starting out, that was not true. I had to think about the next change and this left the void I think your talking about. A void between chord changes.
I also don’t think about the strumming pattern much. I would guess I should think about it more, but I don’t.
My own problem is I just play how I feel the song. I hear whatever song in my mind and try to copy the sound. This makes the changes happen pretty fast w/o hesitation. I think this may only come as you become at least kinda fluid in your, or my, playing. Some chords lend themselves to a change better than others too imho. Like Am7 to C. Which is just adding the C note instead of the A note to the same Am7 shape. Other chords can be done that way too. Sometimes the next chord becomes a inversion chord, but it’s still that same chord I’m after, so it sounds correct.
Perhaps also I’ll use a short phrase of the song to lead from one chord to another. This kinda fills the gap between the two chords.
I think knowing where your going may be key to making the change sound fluid.
I’m doing a song now where I’m playing a Dbdim. Goes Dm, Dbdim, Cm. So kinda a walk down. My initial playing of this I was doing the Dbdim as just playing the note Db, or sometimes Dbmin. The Dbdim was unfamiliar to me. So I practiced that Dbdim chord over and over. While I’m not 100% on that chord yet, I’m close enough that I can usually do right to it to make it sound like I’m walking down. It’s just that now, I’m getting that diminished sound to come through which makes the song sound better and that Dbdim sounds like it want to be resolved. Which is how I hear this song in my mind. Point is. I had/have to learn that Dbdim chord and learn it so well that I grab it w/o thinking about it at all. That’s when the song starts to sound proper to me.
Perhaps another thought. Mostly about me learning the above song. I’m learning it from sheet music. The chords are mostly barre chords. And these chords jump around the fret board by a long distance. I just couldn’t get the song to sound smooth with these jumps. So. I decided to try different ideas of how to play the same chords, just using something other than barre E. So now I play this song mostly around fret 3. I’m barring Am’s and D chords along with barred Dm’s. While this is thinking outside the box from what is written. imho, this song sounds much better when I keep everything around fret 3 as opposed to jumping around w/ barred E chords going from F to C up the neck. I loose that gap between changes of chords, perhaps same thing your talking about.
fwiw, this alt. way of playing chords is only something I’ve discovered after many years of playing. So I didn’t just start out using this idea by any sense of the word. It took years to have it sink in that I can play one chord in many places on the neck. This idea has lead to less gap between chords though as many times my alt. chord is right there on the fret board, right where I’m already playing. I just have to change chord fingering as opposed to jumping many frets to get where I’m going. If that makes sense. I don’t know.
Maybe someone else who knows way more than I do will come along and lead ya proper. My comment is only how I think about your question, which may or may not be correct.
Good luck in your adventure and for sure, have fun in your journey. Which my guess is, forever ongoing… 
Hello Cameron! I believe you’re taking about the songs (Karaoke mode) in the Justin Guitar Songs and Lessons app, right?
If that’s the case, the app does display the suggested strumming pattern (along with demonstrating how it sounds) separately from the song’s playalong mode. For 99% of the songs in the app the pattern remains the same throughout the whole song(*). That being the case, it makes sense that you get the pattern right by itself first, with muted strings (no chord), until it becomes automatic. Only then you switch to playing the song and worrying about chord changes.
For that reason, showing the pattern while showing the next chord for the song does not add much value - it should be fully automatic by the time you’re playing along.
Hope that makes sense - and hope I understood the question correctly 
(*) it starts out as the same pattern throughout, but as you progress in your journey you’ll want to increment things by adding variations for different sections.
Heckler, you are probably right. In the beginner and intermediate songs there isn’t a lot of strumming changes.
Thank you all.
I would argue that it does add value. The first time I used the karaoke mode in the app to play a song I had absolutely no idea how to translate the strumming pattern to the actual song. It took me a rather long time to get there.
There is a REALLY HUGE gap in guitar instruction in this neighborhood (with a number of interrelated specific issues). Some people don’t seem to be troubled by it. But man, it broke my brain for a couple of decades and is one of the reasons why I could never stick with the guitar long enough to actually learn anything.
I needed very specific coaching to get through it. And I am learning to find a strum by just “feeling” the song now. But guitar people more or less all gave me blank looks when I told them what gave me trouble. They had no guidance because it was just “something they do” and never thought about how. I learned how to do this from ukulele players of all people. They didn’t have the process down perfectly, but they had a better way of explaining it than any guitar people I spoke to.
The short of it is that they told me that the strumming pattern doesn’t matter (it kinda does, at least in some cases, but that’s beside the point) and that what you need to do is pick a strumming pattern and stick with it. Play the same thing all the way through at first. Just pick one and run with it.
Later on, you can start trying something different in the verses vs. the chorus or bridge or adding walkdowns or little riffs or solos or whatever.
Yup, I see your point and agree with it. Myself, I remember having the most trouble along two lines:
- Figuring out mid-bar chord changes (ok, that’s not that hard, but it was still a jump when all my skillset was good for was playing “old faithful” for the entire bar, same chord
- “Getting the hang” of 16th-note strumming patterns, especially the more “sparse” ones, and also more complex 2-bar patterns. Combine that with chords lasting for less than a full bar and I dismissed several songs from the app catalog because they were just too complex for my current playing skills at the time - probably still are, 16th-note strumming is still a bit of an Achilles’ heel of mine.
Kinda like asking Michael Jordan how to shoot a jump shot. after a very blank confused look, uhm you just shoot it 
That first one gives me hell when I’m at a group jam and we play a song that has those mid-bar chord changes and I don’t know until I’m suddenly playing the wrong chord. Takes me til the end of the song to figure it out. When I do, I am probably just taking the easiest option out (essentially two quarter note strums on each chord most of the time).
I’m not really even touching 16th note strums yet. The group I play with on the occasional Monday night has a couple of guys who play most everything with 16th note strums. Used to be I’d be completely lost at that, but I was proud of myself for playing 8th note strums and staying in time with them last night.
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