What is the strumming pattern of this guitar tab from "Bring Me to Life" by Evanescence? [closed]

Question

I'm trying to learn how to play "Bring Me to Life" by Evanescence on guitar, and I'm following Christian Torres's cover on YouTube:

Only problem is, I suck at reading music, and I'm having trouble trying to figure out the strumming patterns that he's using. Ideally I'd like to translate the tab onto a chart with a down or up strum for each sixteenth note, but I can't read it well enough to figure out the timing.

Specifically during the choruses (0:45 for example), how would you determine that strumming pattern? For example, in the image below, I see that the first note in each measure has a straight vertical line under it, which I'm guessing is just a quarter note? Then the next three have a horizontal line going across the bottom... which is an eighth note? The note in between those two also has its own horizontal line partially sticking out which is a sixteenth note? (Why is it only partially sticking out and not connected to the ones right and left of it?)

I feel like if I can learn enough to just make sense of the chorus then I'll have enough to figure out the rest of the song.

This is the type of chart I'm trying to translate it to (I count sixteenth notes in my head with "1 e & a"):

Answer 1

TL;DR

The strumming pattern you want is:

Dudu DuDU dUDu DuDu  
1e&a 2e&a 3e&a 4e&a

---

Why is that?

You are correctly interpreting the tab, but the tab itself is badly written.

The specific note durations, explained below, are as indicated in the question; however, the notes are grouped in a way that is difficult to read.

a straight vertical line ... which I'm guessing is just a quarter note?

That's correct. For the purposes of maintaining a sixteenth-note up-down pattern, this would represent two up-down pairs, but only the first strum would actually contact the strings.

"Then the next three have a horizontal line going across the bottom... which is an eighth note? ... The note in between those two also has its own horizontal line partially sticking out which is a sixteenth note?"

Yes. There are two things going on here: 1) there is a beam (horizontal line) showing that the three notes together form a group; 2) where the line attaches to the notes, a single line indicates an eighth note and a double-line indicates a sixteenth note.

That is, the two "outer" notes are eighth notes, the "inner" note is a sixteenth note, and the three together for a rhythmic grouping. They're beamed together to increase readability (when done correctly; see below).

"Why is [the "double line"] only partially sticking out and not connected to the ones right and left of it?"

Because only the middle note is a sixteenth note. Were the line to connect to either of the others, that would mean that note is also a sixteenth.

So the problem is ... ?

Typically, a grouping in 4/4 time, as this song is, will represent one or two beats; however, this particular grouping represents 1.25 beats. The second group represents .75 beats. So taken together, they represent two full beats, but should be written differently, to better delineate each beat.

Here is a rewrite:

Note that the eighth note that ended the first grouping has been split into two sixteenth notes connected by a tie (which means, don't strum on the second sixteenth note).

Now the sixteenth-note strum pattern is more clear. Here is the pattern, with capital-bold letters meaning "actually strum" and lower-case letters meaning "fake strum".

Dudu DuDU dUDu DuDu