Learn to play Heart Of Gold by Neil Young on JustinGuitar!
View the full lesson at Heart Of Gold by Neil Young | JustinGuitar
Hi Justin,
There is a convention for tabbing harmonica and plenty of tabs on the net. As a long term harmonica player I can recommend;
www.harptabs.com
Itās free, has a huge collection of tabs inc. Heart of Gold
Hope this is of use.
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Iām just starting grade 2 and having a lot of fun with it. Learning air chords for the āNeil Young Cā. The little riff is very fun to do over and over tooā¦so far no complaints in my house on this. lol. One thing I find happens is the position of my pick moves as I strum and when I come back to the riff it isnāt in the most ideal position. Anyone else find this?
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I still struggle with this sometimes. For me, the pick rotates between my fingers as I strum sometimes, and before I realize it, it is pointed 90 degrees from where it should be!
I found that the nylon picks with a rough surface help to minimize this. However, gentler strumming and lots of practice probably helped just as much as the picks did.
The picks are available from Amazon, Sweetwater, etc.
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The other question Iād ask is what thickness of pick do you use? The thicker / more rigid the pick you use, the more itās likely to get dislodged when you strum. Personally I play this song with either a paper-thin 0.46mm pick or at most a 0.60mm pick.
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Iām currently working on Heart of Gold - Neil Young. Playing along with the track on Justinās app. Iāve finished Grade 1 and Iām going to park for a bit and perfect my chord changes.
Iāve been working on it at 80% tempo, and the chord changes at that speed, are ok, Iād say around 75% (that bloody C chord 
).
My question is that the strumming at that speed feels awkward. In other words, the strumming is palpably too slow and makes it distracting and weird. But at the next increment (90% tempo), I canāt hit the chords enough to make a fairly nice sounding song.
Recommendations on how to proceed with practice on this song? Stay at the speed and deal with the awkwardness of strumming or take it up a notch and feel like Iām botching the chords?
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Thatās my advice. Itās taken me a long while to learn to resist the temptation to speed things up. I now push myself to play at the pace (slower) thatās accurate before speeding up.
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Iām with you on that one! I am mostly just fine with C when I do OMC, but throw it into a song and I tend to get flustered.
Everyone I have ever seen giving advice on this kind of question always, always, always says the answer is to keep it slow. I have a hard time with strumming in rhythm at slow tempos. I can hit the chords by slowing down, but I am constantly waaaaaaay off the beat. I think it is because I have too much time to think between strums, and you know what they say about that? If youāre thinkinā youāre stinkinā!
To be fair, I am not particularly on the beat at any tempo, but it isnāt as noticeable at a faster tempo.
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YES! Exactly this! 
I know it will come though, so Iām keeping at it 
Reading what you said, I wonder if perhaps we have the same tendency on the tempo, and maybe thatās why I have trouble playing songs Iām familiar with at slower speeds. Maybe you donāt have trouble with tempo or rhythm at all, but you actually have and in-ate āsenseā of them. Maybe you, like me, have trouble subconsciously adjusting to a tempo that is too slow for a song that you know should be a certain tempo?
I played the clarinet in Concert Band from the age of 10, and Concert and Jazz Band in High School. If I pick it up today, I can play itā¦granted, I might squeak and squalk it a bit, but put a piece of music in front of me and in a while, Iāll squalk it for you 
. Tempo and rhythm has stuck with me ever since, so I wonder if thatās why playing a familiar tune slower than I know it should be in my subconscious is the reason itās so distracting for me? Things for me to ponder 
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Nope! I have pretty much no sense of rhythm under any circumstances, but it feels worse at slow tempo. Iām like Navin Johnson in the beginning of āThe Jerk.ā (Funny movie, you young folks should look it up. Stay away from the cans! He hates these cans!!)
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Sounds like a challenge, finding a groove at a slower tempo.
Have you considered making the arc of your strumming bigger? So rather than just slowing down how you usually strum, make each down and up take longer, which means youād would be slowing the action down less.
Hope that makes sense.
No idea if it will be helpful.
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Heather
Sometimes playing slow is actually harder and yes I know that sounds counter intuitive but it is something that is frequently said.
So I would imagine you have the chord sequence down now ? Or could at least jot them down, so you could crib them away from the song app ? If so, ditch the app for a bit and play against a metronome, starting at 75 to get the old familiar feel. Get the song feeling comfortable and then bump it just 2 bpm. Wash rinse repeat until you get to the songās original tempo but take your time.
Cheers
Toby
PS to my old forum pals, is the a first use of āWash Rinse Repeatā do I get a badge ?
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Canāt say for sure, Toby, mebbe. But have a badge anyway if itāll make you happy 
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As @TheMadman_tobyjenner says playing at a lower tempo can be more difficult to maintain. Thatās a good suggestion to play with a metronome at a low bpm and gradually increase the bpm. Thatās exactly what I do when learning a strumming pattern. Once youāre able to play the strumming pattern along with the metronome at any tempo, if youāve got Justinās Time Trainer, you could also then practice the strumming patterns using beat drops and bar drops.
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One question @Heatherxx, have you tried doing OMC with the same chord changes as you are struggling with in the song (youāll need to do the reverse change eventually, so it wonāt hurt you to embed it now)?
If not then that, may well be worth a go.
Very much this (as well)! Practice in context is extremely valuable and is an excellent way to ābed-inā technique.
(Edit: to make clear what follows is an alternative to @TheMadman_tobyjennerās suggestion)
If you are already doing the changes in your OMC practice, then you might also want to consider using a metronome while doing OMC to check and even tune the speed of your changes [this will also take OMC up a level of difficulty (maybe even two levels!)].
When using a metronome during OMC, it will become obvious really quickly whether your changes are really happening between the beats or if you are adjusting your strumming tempo to get the change to āfitā (if you want to try this, then the song is 86 BPM, so start slower than this, and work up to it just a couple of BPM at a time).
As this is more challenging, then to start, you might want to try just changing each four strums, rather than on every strum (as in ānormalā OMC). When you want to increase the tempo, add 2 or 3 BPM (this sounds small, but will feel way different!).
[For an even greater level of challenge, then you can also look at reducing the number of strums between changes (e.g. change each two strums, and if you can do that, on each strum), this is a much more advanced variation though]
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Just to be clear, if you are playing the song at 75 bpm, I was suggesting playing the song against the metronome and gradually increasing to speed, ie keeping the song in context. Doing OMCs with a metronome is a great exercise but it does not always translate to a whole song, sometimes you just need build it up slow.
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I have never slowed down and practiced any song by strumming rhythm. Iād rather make some mistakes or imperfections than play with an awkward feeling of tempo.
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Pffftttt!!!
Attention seeking 
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Sorry, yes, on a re-read itās not clear that I was suggesting an alternative! Completely agree that āpractice in contextā is often a good way to go. My (badly made) point is that sometimes it is also worth doing some additional drills, to check the underlying technique.
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Donāt forget to just practice the strumming pattern. Mute the strings with your fretting hand and strum to the metronome, slowly increasing.
You want to get the strumming pattern so ingrained that it is not what you think about while playing.
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