easy songs for beginners

Learn to play The Wallflowers’ “Three Marlenas” – picking up some easy and interesting chord changes and strumming tips along the way!

Our lesson of A Horse With No Name continues with advice on how to spice up your strumming as well as a look at the solo from the original recording.

A Horse With No Name by America is one of the easiest songs for you to learn. We’re going to teach you how to play it while throwing in some music theory.

Hey There Delilah by Plain White T’s is a great pop song that will help you pick up some solid technique whether you use a pick or play finger style.

Man on the Moon by R.E.M. is a beautiful song that beginners can easily learn to play. We’ll also add some nice touches for a solo arrangement.

In our beginner arrangement of R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion you can play the guitar, mandolin and bass parts all on a solo acoustic guitar. Sounds great.

This is a fun and easy to way to play the REM song Driver 8. We’re also going to learn a few new tricks like incorporating riffs into strumming.

Learn how to play the sparse and spooky (but very easy to learn) version of Scarborough Fair that Nick and David came up with while working on The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar.

We’re going to learn different fingerpicking patterns for House of the Rising Sun, a folk song covered by the Animals, Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton and others.

Many people were introduced to this traditional song through Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged session. It’s also been recorded by Leadbelly and many others.

Our arrangement of this Jack Johnson song looks at barre chords, rhythm and string muting. Also included is a barre chord free arrangement for early beginners.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about how to turn a song into a single guitar arrangement and the first part of the answer is that you have to learn the song! In this lesson we break down this White Stripes’ song into its component parts – bass, rhythm and lead (learning them on the electric guitar) – so that we can later create a single acoustic guitar arrangement of this song.

Our arrangement of this Bob Dylan favorite from Nashville Skyline can be played very easily with the use of a capo, plus a very simple picking pattern.

If you’re going to play an emotionally charged song, you can’t hide behind a single strumming pattern. Comfortably Numb is one of the highlight songs from Pink Floyd’s The Wall and we have arranged it for a single guitar, using many strumming and crosspicking techniques we’ve gone over in our Guitar Noise Podcast series.

This is an easy, yet slightly challenging take on a familiar strumming/picking pattern featuring a Rolling Stones song that you’ll be playing well in no time at all.

We are going to use this classic Beatles song to get started on barre chords and learn a cool little guitar riff. Plus we will add in another walking bassline.

This is another Easy Songs lesson that is geared to the close to absolute beginner. We’ll take basic chords that we already can play, add a very simple strumming / picking pattern and before you can say lunatic you’ll be playing a very cool song.

Here’s another Easy Song for Beginners’ Lesson, using our continued study of walking bass lines to help us create an arrangement where the bass line also helps us move the song along by shadowing the melody. Once the basics are in place, you can make the rest of the arrangement as simple or as complicated as you’d like.

David returns to the pages of Guitar Noise with another Easy Song for Beginners lesson. Work on your chord changes and strumming with not one, but two great country classics.

As you learn more and more techniques, you should start trying to incorporate them into the songs you already know. We’ll take a very easy song and come up with some interesting things we can do for arranging it for the single guitar.