How do you do percussive strumming with melody lines on guitar?

Question

During a performance of Old Man, Neil Young strummed the guitar while having melody lines as well. He did the percussive strumming while also playing a melody with his guitar.

How do you do that?

Answer 1

Here are the techniques he's using:

His strumming pattern is pretty basic, I'd notate it as sixteenth notes, each beat is down-up-down-up. He often misses the strings on the upstrokes, so it's an eighth note sound with some 16th notes in there.

He doesn't just strum all the strings, he often focuses his downstrokes on lower strings and upstrokes on higher strings. In the quieter intro and first verse, he's just not playing all the strings even though his hand is fully moving up and down. He's using his wrist to make a smaller strumming motion so he can control the pick more precisely.

As he goes into the chorus, watch how his elbow joint starts to work more in a wider strum that does catch all of the strings.

So one important part of his technique is controlled strumming - somewhere between a full strum and single-string picking.

With his left (fretting) hand, he is using hammer-ons and pull-offs to add melodic changes to the chord shapes that he plays, particularly in the verses. Sometimes he's catching a string on an upstroke partial strum which highlights that note. Basically he's changing a single note of a larger chord and that is how we play a melody and chords at the same time.

Sometimes this latter technique is notated as rapidly changing chord symbols. A very common one is Dsus4 D Dsus2 D, which is really just playing an open D chord and lifting and placing your fourth and second fingers on the third and second frets (respectively) of the high E string. That creates a melody over a D chord. There are many other similar melody-over-chord patterns.

When you combine selective strumming with the changing notes within chords, you get a strummed melody. How percussive the strumming is is entirely related to the right hand strumming technique and the left hand doesn't have to change what it's doing at all.