When it comes to learning music, the most important thing that you can use your eyes for is reading. But that’s just the first step of many. Being able to read tablature or music notation (and, ideally, you want to be good at reading both) won’t help you if you don’t apply your brain to your reading.

Hopefully, this lesson on Jack Johnson’s Banana Pancakes will help you understand the importance of both these points. Plus, it will give you some more work with easy forms of barre chords (something we all need, beginners or not). Don’t worry, though – you’ll also have the choice of playing this song (almost) entirely without barre chords, if you so choose.

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Structure and Rhythm

Breaking down Banana Pancakes in terms of musical structure doesn’t take long. The song is in the key of G, it’s in 4 / 4 timing (at a tempo between 112 and 120 beats per minute, if I’m not mistaken) and there is a short introduction that uses (as you’ll soon see) a very simple riff and flits between two chords – Am7 and G7 twice before very briefly using D7 as a “turnaround” chord to get us to the first verse. The verses are made up of a four-chord progression (G7, D7, Am7, and C7) where each chord gets two beats. This progression is played four times and then we have a chorus that is conveniently the same musical structure of the introduction.

Verse and chorus then are repeated, although the second chorus is twice as long as the first one. This extended part of the chorus doesn’t contain the riffs of the first one (or the introduction). Then we have a bridge that has two measures each of Am7, D, Am7, D, and Bm7 followed by single measures of Em, C, G, and D7 and then a measure-and-a- half of G before another two-beat turn around on D7 to take us back to the last verse and chorus. The final chorus, like the second chorus, is twice the length of the first chorus.

As good as all this information is, the first thing you truly need to know about this song is that it is played in swing eighths. Swing rhythm is something that is close to impossible for most people to pick up visually. Why? Because if you are watching the “down and up” strokes of a guitarist, the strumming looks identical to strumming regular eighth notes. Unless you’re listening (and, preferably, counting), you may not catch it.

Even written sheet music doesn’t always tell you that something is in swing rhythm. Usually it will be written out just as regular eighth notes. Here is a simplified version of the opening riff of Banana Pancakes written out for you (I’ve taken out the frills – don’t worry, you’ll get the “real” thing in a moment!) and played in both regular (or “straight”) eighth notes and then again in swing. I’m also counting along so that you can hear the difference:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Straight eighths divide a beat evenly. You count them “one and two and three and four and…” In swing eighths, the beat is divided evenly into three parts (a triplet), but you play just the first and the last note of that triplet. In other words, you would count out “one and a two and a three and a four and a” but only play the numbers and the “a”s, not the “and”s.

If you want to get a good primer to swing rhythms, listen to Guitar Noise Podcast # 13. All of the music notation for this lesson will be written like “regular” eighth notes but you want to think of them in terms of swing eighths. One of the reasons that sheet music is written this way is to make the life of whoever’s writing the notation a little easier! Scribbling out all those triplets is a royal pain!

Introduction, Basic Barres and Reading Finger Position Clues

Barre chords are a signature part of Jack Johnson’s sound. You won’t produce the jazz-styled chord voicings and chunky rhythmic sounds he gets without them. And the barre chords involved in Banana Pancakes are, for the most part, very easy. This is one reason why it’s a great song to use for barre chord practice.

The Introduction / Chorus section of Banana Pancakes introduces the Am7 and G7 chords you will run into throughout the song. Both of these chords are what we’d call “E shaped” barre chords. The Am7 is an Em7 (020000) moved up to the fifth and seventh frets (575555) and the G7 is an E7 (020100) moved up to the third, fourth and fifth frets (353433). For both chords, you want to barre the appropriate fret with your index finger, then use your ring finger to get the note on the A string and your middle finger to get the note on the G string. If you’re careful about how you strum, you can get away with not fingering the A string at all. Just miss it when you strum either chord. This is especially easy to do on the upstrokes and, conveniently enough, you’ll be playing these chords mostly on the upstrokes. Here’s the Introduction, except for the very last measure:

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If you’re going to go with the barre chords, then it’s important to let the fingering of the barre chord help you determine how to go about fingering the riff. Since the first riff ends with the Am7 barre chord, you want to make the first slide (usually done from the fifth fret, even though it’s not indicated) with the ring finger. Sliding the ring finger up to the seventh fret puts you in great position to use your index finger for the notes at the fifth fret and also lets you use the index finger for the slide from the fifth fret to the third fret later in the measure. Using your index finger for the slide that begins the second measure ensures you are in a good position to make the Am7 barre chord. You hit the A note (fifth fret of the low E (sixth) string on the first beat and strum down on the second beat with your fingers not quite in place, just off the strings enough to mute them, and then set the chord in place and strum it on the following upstroke.

And just how did I decide on where to put the upstrokes and downstrokes? Well, from listening to Banana Pancakes and from counting out the rhythm while listening to it, I realized that all the strumming was done in either quarter notes (one per beat) or eighth notes (two per beat, done with “swing” as we’ve already discussed). And when dealing with measures of eighth notes, the easiest way to play them is using a downstroke on the beat and an upstroke for the eighth note that falls between the beat, like this:

Again, I can’t stress enough how rhythm is best learned through listening and feel. The temptation is to make it out to be a lot harder than it really is. Read through our lessons on basic strumming, like Getting Past Up and Down and others that you will find on our “Strumming for Beginners” section that you can access through the “Hot Lessons” page. And be on the lookout for a new strumming lesson that will feature a bit of the Jack Johnson song, Taylor. This should be up online before the end of January 2010.

Meanwhile, this particular fingering pattern for the first riff in the “Introduction / Chorus” section, as well as the rhythm pattern itself, repeats for the next riff and the following G7 chord. The third riff, which is followed by another Am7 chord, is a slight variation of the first two, using more notes on the A string, but your fingers should still be in position to get the notes at the fifth fret with your index finger and the notes at the seventh fret with your ring finger. The last riff and the following G7 chord are clones of the second pass through the Introduction.

The last measure of the Introduction involves a chord change from G7 to D7 and also gives a great demonstration of how easy, yet complicated, a simple eighth note strumming pattern can sound:

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There are two aspects of this to work on. The first is the fingering and the changing between the chords. This D7 chord is based on the open position C7 shape (x32310), in fact it’s just a C7 chord moved two frets up the neck. We’ve seen it most recently in the Holiday Song Lesson on Away in a Manger. It’s a cool chord because if you hit the open high E (first) string by accident, you’ve got a D9 chord, which usually will work as a substitute, particularly in blues-y and jazz type songs.

More important, moving between the G (or G7) barre chord we’ve been using and this D7 chord is actually something that you’ll run into a lot. Why? Well, in the key of G, G is the “I” or the root chord. D, or D7 in this case, is the “V” chord, and the I – V or V- I chord progressions are some of the most common ones found in songs of all types.

And (almost as if someone planned it that way) making this switch isn’t all that hard, although it will take some concentrated practice to get it smooth. What makes it relatively easy is that your fingers, when in the G or G7 barre chord position, are either where you want them to be for the D7 or close enough that you don’t have to move all that far. Your ring finger, sitting on the fifth fret of the A string, doesn’t move at all. The index finger goes from laying flat on the third fret to standing up in place on the third fret of the B string. Meanwhile your middle finger shifts from the fourth fret of the G string to the fourth fret of the D string. Simply add your pinky to the fifth fret of the G string and you’re there!

Take some time just switching between these two chord shapes. Start slowly at first, making certain that your fingers are ending up exactly where you want them to be. Then work on moving your fingers together as a unit. For some great tips on practicing chord changes, check out Tom Hess’ recent article on this very topic – Teaching Chords.

The second aspect, getting the rhythm right, will also require practice, persistence and patience on your part. The measure starts out with a rest, but you want to make certain you make the downward motion of the strum during that rest (the whole “sock puppet” thing again) so that you’re in place for the upstroke. You’ll hear me counting this all out very slowly on the MP3, so hopefully that will help you to get the timing into your head.

Verses, More Rhythms and Open Chord Substitutions

Believe it or not, you’ve pretty much got the song down at this point. The verses, as detailed earlier, a simple two measure progression that repeats four times:

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There are some fun (and slightly sneaky!) things going on here. First, the rhythm is the same one in “Example 3″ from the “Sock Puppet” lesson mentioned earlier. You hit the root note of the chord on the first and third beats (the quarter notes) and then strum down and up for the eighth notes that occur during the second and fourth beats. Remember that it’s still in swing rhythm and you’ll be fine!

The upstroke on the chord (on the second half of both the second and fourth beats) is a muted catch of the strings. This is very cool because that’s where you want to be making the chord change anyway, so the string muting actually helps you to cover up getting your fingers set! Told you it was a bit sneaky!

As promised, you can also do this part, not to mention the whole song, almost entirely without barre chords. I say “almost” because I do think you might like the “easy partial barre” voicing of Am7, which it to barre only the four high strings at the fifth fret. You can use the open A string for your root note, since it is, after all, A.

In the MP3 file for the last example, you can hear me playing it both ways. I play a regular G instead of the G7 but I like the voicing of D7 we’ve been using so I’ve kept that. And I also like the Am7 so I use the “easy partial barre” I just described and follow up with a regular open position C7. You can certainly use a regular open position Am7 (x02010) if you’d like. And, as you can hear, there’s not enough difference between the open position chords and the barre chords worth worrying about. Not to mention that if you’re trying to sing the lyrics and play the song at the same time you may find the open chords a little easier.

But the barre chords are not all that hard, either. You’ve already been practicing the G7 to

D7 shift, so you should be okay with that one. If you make use of the “easy partial barre” form of Am7 and use your ring finger to barre the strings at the fifth fret, then you never have to shift your index finger from the third fret for the entire chord progression since the C7 barre uses the open position A7 shape with a barre at the third fret. You probably never thought barre chords could be so much fun!

Choruses, Extended Choruses, Bridge and Bonus Riff

The final C7 of the verse goes to Am7 instead of G, signaling the start of the chorus. The first chorus is pretty much like the Introduction but without the first riff (because we begin at the Am7) and a slightly different rhythm:

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Here the rhythm is still all eighth notes (and by this point I don’t have to say “swing,” do I?) and the root note is still played on the first and third beat, but the chords themselves are on the offbeat, so they are played with upstrokes while the string muting takes place on the second and fourth beats. Keep your upstrokes short and don’t forget to keep your strumming in motion during the muting and you’ll find this isn’t at all difficult. It’s when you start thinking about it, when you try to visualize it, that the rhythm tends to falter. Try it with your eyes closed – that often helps!

The last measure of the first chorus is exactly like the last measure of the Introduction, but with a G note in the bass (played at the third fret of the low E (sixth) string) instead of an eighth rest. And yes, you can use open position chords just as well here, as you can in the Introduction.

This latest rhythm, with the chords on the offbeat (upstrokes) is also used to extend the second (and third) chorus, and the bridge as well. The extended choruses are just two extra sets of chord changes – two measures of Am7, two measures of G7, two more measures of Am7 and two of G (355433 for a full barre).

The bridge starts out by switching between Am7 and an A-shaped barre of the D chord (x5777x), played with a bit of an alternating bass line:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

A-shaped barre chords, especially straight major ones (no 7’s, 9’s, etc.,) can be a real pain. Many people tend to cheat on them a little – barring the first set of strings across the first five strings with the index finger and barring the second set (two frets higher) across the first four strings with the ring finger. The thing to remember when playing these this way is to not strum the high E (first) string.

Things get more interesting starting at the fifth line of the bridge with the Bm7 chord. This is an open position Am7 chord that’s been moved up two frets and barred across the second fret with the index finger. Your middle finger gets the third fret of the B string and your ring finger sits at the fourth fret of the D string.

You then slide this entire shape up the neck so that your index finger barres the seventh fret (your middle finger with be on the eighth fret of the B string and your ring finger on the ninth fret of the D string) and add your pinky to the ninth fret of the G string. This is the Em chord that starts the sixth line of the bridge. To get the Em/D# (and for more on slash chords, check out the Easy Songs for Beginners’ Lesson on Eleanor Rigby), keep your middle, ring and pinky fingers in place and slide the index down a fret so it sits at the sixth fret of the A string. You then reform another A major-shaped barre chord at the third and fifth frets to make C (x3555x).

This is a good place to mention that open position chords work very well on the bridge section of Banana Pancakes. Because Jack Johnson doesn’t strike his high E string for the D, Em and C chords, his chord voicings are very similar to the open position chords you know and love. So if you have decided to play totally without barre chords or would simply just like a bit of a respite from them, feel free to use these substitutes:

You’ve probably already noticed that the bridge ends with the exact same G to D7 turnaround that you’ve encountered twice already in this song.

Okay, one last thing: In the original recording, Johnson occasionally plays a very short riff (lick, flourish, whatever you’d like to call it) in place of the C7 chord during the verses. He uses it in place of the fourth C7 in the first verse, doesn’t use it at all in the second and then uses it in place of the second C7 in the last verse. It goes like this:

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This is one of those instances where your brain can help you out a lot. Even though the riff takes the place of the C7 chord, it is still based on the Am barre chord, so don’t lose your fingering! Slide your ring finger from the fifth fret of the A string to the seventh fret, then pick both the D and G strings, where your index finger is still barring the fifth fret. Then hammer onto the seventh fret of the D string with your ring finger and pull it off again to sound the note at the fifth fret. As long as you keep your index finger on the fifth fret (after the initial slide on the A string), you should be fine.

You can almost do this verbatim with open position chords, but instead of sliding on the A string, you need to hammer onto the second fret of the D string after initially striking it as an open string.

And there you have all the parts! Here’s the layout for you and you’ll have to forgive my not giving you the usual final MP3 file. I’m pretty sure that after all the explaining, not to mention all the MP3 examples, you can handle this without problems.

I hope that you have enjoyed this song lesson and I also hope that you find it a great way to get going on refining your playing of barre chords, not to mention working on some simple rhythm skills.

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

It should be easy to understand that, for a beginner (not to mention for a teacher), “I just do it” is more than mildly frustrating. How does one go about learning if one can’t get instruction?

The purpose of this lesson, a look at Seven Nation Army, from the White Stripes 2003 major label debut album, Elephant, is twofold – first we want to look at the interesting rhythmic pattern that serves as the song’s signature hook. We’re also going to take the song apart as we normally do in these lessons, but for the purpose of latter creating a single acoustic guitar arrangement of this song. That will be in an upcoming lesson. Today, we’re all electric!

So let’s get through this part and move on:

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Structurally, Seven Nation Army is about as simple as song come. There are three verses, four if you count the guitar solo between the second and third verse as verse. These verses are essentially made up of two parts, one that repeats itself over and over even though it may be played by just the bass guitar at some points and by a dense, multi-layered recording of guitars the next. This part also serves as the introduction, the outro and as a musical interlude between the verses. There is also a second two-measure pattern that “formally” ends each verse and also pops up during the solo and at the end of the interlude between the first and second verse.

It’s this first part that contains the interesting rhythm we want to look at and analyze. Here is the bass guitar part, a line of single notes, which I’ve written out for guitar:

The first two notes, the E notes located at the second fret of the D string, are harmless enough. The first is a dotted quarter note and lasts for a beat and a half in length, while the second is an eighth note and is a half beat in length. And this would probably be a great place to point out that while I’ve written out to play these notes at the second fret of the D string, you can also play them elsewhere on the neck of your guitar, such as the seventh fret of the A string or the twelfth fret of the low E (sixth) string, if you prefer.

I thought it would be good to have them all within easy fingering of one another.

The last three notes, at first glance, are quarter notes, which would be problematic in that we would be looking at a total of five beats in the first measure, a measure that is clearly marked in “4/4″ time so it should have only four beats in it. Looking closer, though, you should see a little bracket over these three quarter notes and a number “3″ imbedded in that bracket. This indicates that these three notes make up a quarter note triplet, which means that these three notes are supposed to be evenly spread out among these last two beats of the measure.

That may sound simple enough (although I’m certain to many of you it doesn’t sound simple in the least), but how do we go about making this happen? Counting out a triplet over two beats isn’t at all easy, even for seasoned players. So we’re going to “cheat” for a moment and make it simpler to count by pretending the song was written in 2/4 time, like this:

To do this, we’re cutting all the note values in half – half notes become quarter notes, quarter notes become eighth notes and eighth notes become sixteenth notes. A triplet over two beats will become a triplet over a single beat.

The purpose for doing this is to make it easier to count and to get the rhythm into your head. Most people count sixteenth notes like this: “One, ee, and, ah, two, ee, and, ah…” and triplets are counted “one and ah two and ah…” So we’re going to combine these two and make this measure of two beats go “One, ee, and, ah, two and ah.”

The most important part of this is to make the triplet a triplet, spreading the three notes evenly across the beat, and not turning it into a set of three sixteenth notes with a sixteenth note rest attached. If you’ve listened to the first third of Guitar Noise Podcast 3, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

You can help yourself here by tapping out the beats with your foot, slow and steady. When you are comfortable, pick a four syllable word and say it evenly across the beat. “Alligator” works nicely if you’re stuck for one! Say that for a few beats and then start saying a three syllable word (“elephant” might be appropriate, given the song in question), again making sure that the three syllables are evenly spaced in the beat.

When you’re good with the counting, you can put it all back together, first in 2/4 and then back in 4/4, as done in this example:

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You’ll notice that when going back to 4/4 timing, I draw out the triplet on the third beat when counting it aloud. It’s not at all easy to count out even beats while playing quarter note triplets, so I think you may find this method a little easier. And, since this rhythm figure is very much the heartbeat of Seven Nation Army, it goes without saying that you want to work it into your head and fingers so that you can play it effortlessly. Don’t skimp on the practice and, whatever way you choose to count out the beats and rhythms, don’t be shy about counting out loud. It can, and does, help quite a bit.

And once you’re good with this snippet of rhythm, the rest of the song is going to be a breeze! The second part, which we’ll conveniently call “Example 2,” is two measures of power chords (G5 and A5) played in straight eighth notes, like this:

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There are, of course, many ways to play this. On the original recording, there are at least two different guitars playing the part, one using two string power chords and one using two-string power chords for the G5 and then switching to the open position A chord (the A chord shown in the “Alternate” example here). In these examples, I’m using three-string power chords instead of two-string power chords simply because I like the fuller sound. After all, I’m using one guitar instead of overdubbing a second one. You should try out different variations of these chords and see which you like best.

The next section of Seven Nation Army is actually a repeat of the first section, only it’s fleshed out with full chords, using the single note bass line as the root notes for the chords. Again, on the original recording there are at least two different guitar parts. One guitar plays Root 5 position three-string power chords, like this (this example isn’t played in the MP3 files, by the way):

In case you don’t know what “Root 5 Power Chords” or simply what “Power Chords” are, you can address that by taking a quick look at two of our lessons here at Guitar Noise. The first, The Power of Three, shows you how the four basic types of chords (major, minor, augmented and diminished) are formed. The second, Building Additions (and Suspensions) goes on to detail the creation of other chords, with power chords being the first example in the lesson.

“Root 5″ power chords are simply power chords whose root note is played on the fifth (A) string. And you can see that all the power chords in this example have their root note on the A string.

There is another guitar playing full major chords on the D, G and B strings. This guitar is also being played with a slide. I decided not to use a slide for the MP3 in order to keep things simple:

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Hopefully, one of the reasons for using the open position A chord in Example 2 becomes clear here. Your fingers are already in this shape and now you can just slide them up and down the neck of your guitar at will. If you’re careful about your strumming and can avoiding hitting the first (high E string), then you can use a single finger to barre across the second fret for the open position A and then be about your merry way for Example 3.

Another thing to point out here is that in the original recording, the slide guitar uses a single quarter note of the final B chord (which I have here as a half note) and follows that up with a quarter note of A (X0222X). Either way works fine.

When you’re comfortable moving around on Example 3, the only thing left to do is to be able to switch between the sections, from Example 1 to Example 2 to Example 3 and then back again from Example 3 to Example 2 to Example 1, as demonstrated in this MP3:

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That’s essential the whole song, once you put it all together. Feeling very much at ease with this particular rhythm is going to be essential if you’re going to sing and play it at the same time, so be sure to practice it as much as you may have to. Then practice it even more!

Here’s a lay out of how the song goes:

As I mentioned, there is a guitar solo between the second and third verses. It’s done on slide, but can be easily done without it as well and still sound okay. Well, you might want to make a few alterations and we’ll discuss that in a moment.

The solo itself is fairly simple, using just single notes taken, for the most part, from the E minor pentatonic scale in the following positions:

I’ve taken the liberty of adding the two notes taken from outside of the Em pentatonic scale (C at the thirteenth fret of the B string and F# at the fourteenth fret of the high E (first) string) in parenthesis so that you can add them to your practice warm up of the scale.

The solo is played over four repetitions of “Example 3″ and ends by going back to “Example 2.” Since you’re up that high on the neck for the solo, you’ll probably find it easier to play the G5 in the same three-string manner that the slide guitar uses, that is laying your finger across the twelfth fret (X X 12 12 12 X) and playing just the D, G and B strings, as indicated. For the A5, just slide it up two frets (X X 14 14 14 X).

Okay, then, here’s the solo. You will note that there are three places in the first half (the first eight measures) where there’s a double stop on the seventh fret of the D and A strings. These notes are A and E, respectively, so you’re basically playing an inversion of A5 in the solo while the rhythm is playing an E chord. It will sound slightly dissonant. That’s what goes on in the original recording, most probably from using the slide.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Also, this is not exactly “note for note,” but it’s certainly close enough for anyone but the nittiest of nitpickers.

Anyway, I also hope that you had fun with this song. We’ll be coming back to it later this fall and examining how to turn it into a single acoustic guitar arrangement. That should prove fairly interesting, no?

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

So, instead let me say that this lesson, a single guitar arrangement of Lay Lady Lay, a song a lot of people single out as one of their favorites of Bob Dylan, is definitely going to pose some challenges. But rest assured these aren’t insurmountable challenges.

Let’s dispense with the formalities and get right down to work, then, okay?

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Notice my use of the word “work.” Unlike many people, the word carries no bad connotations with me, and that may be why I have no problem expecting learning any song to involve some work. And that’s after close to thirty-five years of playing. There is little in life that is not going to involve some degree of work. So if you have a problem with the word “work,” you’re kind of setting yourself up with a ready excuse as to why you can’t do something. So now who’s being discouraging?

If anything else, I hope that those of you reading and learning from all the lessons and articles here on Guitar Noise understand and appreciate that nothing about learning the guitar involves magic, anymore than it truly involves me. You are the one putting the effort into learning and making things happen. I’m not much more than a glorified tour guide.

Perhaps a better way of putting it is that even though I’ve done a bit of work for you, putting things in order and arranging them as nicely as possible, you’ve got to also put in the work required for you to make the music happen. I’ll do my best to talk you through the stages as we go. Essentially, we’re going to take something that is slightly difficult and then deliberately make it more difficult in order to get better at our barre chord technique.

First off, let’s deal with some necessary preliminary steps. Structurally, Lay Lady Lay is made up of three verses. Each verse has an “A” section (the “lay lady lay” part) that consists of a four chord progression that repeats itself without the lyrics. This “A” section is then repeated as the second line of the verse and is followed by, a “B” section that lasts for two lines before the verse finishes with one last repetition of the “A” section.

If I go to a book of Bob Dylan songs or get the chords off the Internet or even just figure things out myself by ear, this is what I would come up with for the first verse:

You can see how the verse breaks itself into the AABA pattern.

Now, I don’t know about you, but just seeing that C#m listed there is enough to make me think about changing to a key with easier guitar chords. We’re obviously in the key of A major (although there is a very interesting thing going on that we’ll discuss in a moment), and that’s usually going to involve a few barre chords. I’m counting three here, C#m, Bm and F#m, and even though there are ways of getting around these particular chords, I’m still thinking things might go better with a change of key.

Fortunately, I have read Turning Notes into Stone, which explains how to transpose and I’m ready to change all of the chords to their appropriate matches in the key of G:

But this doesn’t help all that much as now I’ve got to deal with both Bm and F. I have gotten rid of one barre chord, since the F#m in the key of A is now an Em in the key of G, so I guess that’s a small victory. Plus, if I throw a capo on the second fret (as I do in all the MP3 examples for this lesson), then I’m back in the original key of A.

Better yet, I know ways of playing the Bm and F chords that don’t involve full barres. Even better, using these particular chord voicings create a natural descending bass line, even though it’s all way up on the D (fourth) string. Let’s start with G, and then use a “four string” version of Bm where the F# note at the fourth fret of the D string is the bass note. Most people will finger this chord with the index finger on the second fret of the high E (first) string, the middle finger on the third fret of the B string, the pinky on the fourth fret of the G string and then the ring finger on the fourth fret of the D. Technically speaking, we can call this chord, “Bm/F#” even though most chord books will list it simply as “Bm.”

From there we’ll go to the typical “beginner’s F” chord, you know, the one where you lay your index finger across the first fret of both the high E (first) and B strings, while your middle finger is at the second fret of the G string and your middle finger gets the third fret of the D string.

Finally, there’s the basic open position Am chord, but in keeping with the walking descending bass line, let’s not play either the low E (sixth) string or even the open A string and let the E note at the second fret of the D string be our bass note.

Putting all this together and using a basic Travis style finger pattern, such as those we’ve used in other lessons, we can put together something like this:

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Think of this particular pattern as a slight variation of the pinch that you used in the lesson on Dust in the Wind. Because we’re working with sixteenth notes, the thumb will be counting off both the “beat” (the “numbers”) as well as the offbeats (the “ands” between the numbers) while the fingers will hit the notes in between. So, following this last example, start with a pinch (both finger and thumb) of both high and low E strings on the first beat and then pick the D string with the thumb on the “and” between beats one and two. This will be followed by a hit of the B string and then the high E (first) string with the fingers (usually index and middle, respectively) and then the thumb will get the G string on the “and” between beats two and three.

This is not an easy pattern to get right out of the box, so don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t go well at first. I’ve included a “variation” that uses the thumb on every beat and offbeat and for some of you this might prove a helpful starting place. But this will sound better once you get the hang of it, so don’t give up! As with all finger picking patterns, the hardest step isn’t usually getting it into your fingers – it’s being able to stop and then switch to another pattern when you want to!

When you switch to the following chords, your bass note will now be on the D string, so your first pinch will be with the thumb on the D and a finger on the high E (first) string, while your second note with the thumb will be on the G string. And this pattern will hold throughout the remaining three chords.

Before we move on, let’s take a minute and look at this progression. We go from G to Bm and then to F and Am. In the key of G, G is obviously the root (the “I” chord) while Bm is the “iii” chord. It’s not the strongest of progressions, in fact it’s very gentle and subtle and maybe that’s why Dylan went with it as it fits the mood of the song very nicely. The next chord, F, may seem out of place, but in the key of F, F is the root (“I”) and wouldn’t you just be surprised to find out that Am is the “iii” chord? Basically what’s going on here is that we’ve got one “I – iii” progression followed by another. And since Am is also the “ii” chord in the key of G, going from Am to G would be “ii – I” in our original key, another very gentle sounding cadence. I only mention all this because I find this sort of thing interesting, not only from a theory point of view, but also from a songwriter’s perspective.

Anyway, you can, if you’d like, use this pattern and these chord voicings for the entire song and consider the lesson over. Simply skip down to the final example and you’ll find all the chords in a nice “cheat sheet” format and you’d good to go. But if you’d like to get some more work and to, hopefully, get better at playing, then come along and let’s tackle some barre chords.

Why? Because while it’s entirely possible to play guitar all your life and not ever use a single barre chord, you are ultimately limiting much of what you can play. And the only way you’re going to get better at them is to use them. Sitting around talking about how you can’t do them will certainly prove yourself right, but you deserve to treat yourself better than that.

And it’s one thing to strum barre chords, especially on an electric guitar. Try finger picking them on an acoustic if you’d like to get better at them in a hurry!

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This example uses essentially the same finger picking pattern as before, but every chord voicing, with the exception of the Am, is a barre chord. Fortunately, these barre chords are relatively similar and also very close together on the fretboard, so this makes things a little easier for you as you switch from chord to chord.

On the G chord, your index finger barres all six strings at the third fret while your middle finger is on the fourth fret of the G, your pinky is on the fifth fret of the D and your ring finger is on the fifth fret of the A string. If you think about it, your fingers are forming the same shape as the open position E chord. And thinking about your fingers being in this specific shape will help you a lot as you shift from chord to chord.

When changing from the G to the Bm, you want to slightly raise your index finger so that you can shift it down to the second fret (try to stay across all six string even though you’ll only be picking five of them) and, as you shift your index finger, also “relocate” your E shape so that it’s now an “Am” shape, that is, try to transfer all your fingers at one go instead of painstakingly placing them one at a time on the fretboard. You don’t need me to tell you that this is going to be, in all likelihood, a big train wreck the first few (or few dozen) times out. But as your fingers get to understanding what you want them to do, they will seemingly get better a little at a time until you should find that you are handling the change fairly well at a slow speed. And, as you already know, more speed will come with more repetition.

Moving from Bm to F involves more of the same, only this time you’re going back to the E shape. And use the Am at the end of the progression as a chance to catch your breath before doing it all again.

I cannot stress enough that this will probably take most of you some time to get down. Hopefully you understand that something like this is worth the effort on your part. One day you will wake up and think that you just play barre chords by magic, but the fact is that all the time that you’re spending now on this progression will play a big part of that seeming magic.

Again, you can feel free to call it quits here. But if you want to step up to the next challenge, then by all means, let’s continue:

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At first glance, this doesn’t seem all that different from our last example, but it is in a very important way. The first chord, G, is in open position and the second and third chords (the Bm and F) are barres. So that means you’re going to be working on making the shift from the open position G to the Bm barre. To make it even more interesting, I’ve put the F# note at the second fret of the low E (sixth) string, the bass note (I told you earlier there was a reason to barre all six strings on this chord!), so that the bass line now mimics our original “open position” bass line from Example 1. It’s simply an octave lower on the Bm, F and Am chords.

If you play your G chord with your index finger on the second fret of the A string, then you’ve got a head start on making the transition to the Bm a little smoother as all you’ll need do is to stretch it out over the six strings at the second fret. Also take advantage of the fact that your finger picking pattern uses a lot of open strings, which will help you to get a bit of a jump in making the chord change.

Even after all the work you did on the “barre chords only” progression of Example 2, this is going to take more energy and effort on your part. I can only tell you that it will, in the long run, be worth every bit of it. I hope you can trust me on that!

One of the (many) reasons for all this dealing with barre chords is that the technique of barring can help you out a lot even when you’re not playing barre chords. Confused? Well, let’s look at our next example to shed a little light on that:

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This latest pattern is a dead ringer for our first pattern but I’ve decided that I’d like my single guitar arrangement of Lay Lady Lay to contain some of the textures of the pedal steel guitar that accompanies Dylan in the original recording. Absurd, you say? Well, I certainly cannot make my acoustic sound like a pedal steel, even on a good day. But by mimicking some of the notes and licks by use of a hammer-on, such as at the end of both the Bm and F chords here in this example, I can give the listener a bit of the flavor of the pedal steel guitar and hope that his or her mind fills in the rest.

The easiest way of getting these particular notes, you might notice, is by raising and lowering my index finger, just as if I were barring the second fret (for the Bm) or first fret (for the F). And if I want to emphasize the very low bass notes, as we did in Example 3, this would be the only way of accomplishing this. So now you’ve got another excellent reason for keeping up with the barre chord work.

Okay, just to keep this lesson from being too one dimensional, let’s tackle the “B” section of the verse:

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In order to give this section a bit of its own identity, I’ve changed the picking pattern to more of a “straight down and up” sort of arpeggio while keeping the rhythm of the finger pattern of “Section A.” Note the use of the E (second fret of the D string) as the first bass note in the Em chord. This mimics the bass player in the original recording. Playing the B at the second fret of the A string for the second of bass note of the Em chord makes a nice lead down to the G (third fret of the low E (sixth) string) that starts the second measure.

This section also contains what most folks think of as the “signature lick” of this song, namely the little ornamentation at the end of the second measure. To play this, start by fingering an Am7 chord (x02010) and pinch only the D and B strings (the ones where your fingers are on). After performing the pinch, pull-off your fingers on both strings. Remember that you always want to tug down a little when you make a pull-off. That’s what gives you a good clear sounding of the notes of the open strings.

On the original recording, there is a slight variation on this lick, which I’ve included in our last example. To play this, first you’ll need to form a different voicing of Am7 (x02013) that uses either your ring finger or pinky on the third fret of the high E (first) string. Once you’ve formed your chord, play a “three finger pinch,” plucking the D string with your thumb, the B string with the index finger and the high E (first) string with your middle finger and then perform the pull-off on the D and B strings as before while leaving whichever finger you have on the third fret of the high E (first) string, firmly in place.

This signature riff, as well as the “multi-finger pinch,” shows up again in the bridge:

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I should note that I deliberately used both the finger patterns from “Section A” and “Section B” for the bridge, but you can feel free to go with either one or the other. Truth be told, I originally wrote it all out in the style of “Section B” but found myself playing the first measure of the bridge in the style of “Section A” and subsequently re-wrote the music! Sometimes your fingers just do what they want to do!

In the second and sixth measures, you’ll find three block chords (D, Em and G) that require a multi-finger pinch. The easiest solution is to use the thumb on the bass note (the open D string or the open low E (sixth) or the G at the third fret of that same string), the ring finger on the high E (first) string, the middle finger on the B string and the index finger on the G string. Another possible method is to use any finger to “sweep’ across all three high strings in an upstroke motion while playing the bass note with the thumb. Both techniques work fine.

In the final measure of the bridge, I throw in another little guitar lick, taken directly from the original recording. This involves playing the open high E (first) string, and then playing the D note at the third fret of the B string before pulling off to sound the open B. After all the work you’ve done so far, this should prove to be a snap.

To put the finishing touches on our arrangement, let’s add an outro:

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Here the chords simply ascend up the G major scale, going from G to Am to Bm and then to C. Surprisingly, this is the first use of this chord that normally shows up every two to three chords in the key of G!

This entails a little more complicated picking pattern than before, but you can also use either the pattern from “Section A” or “Section B” of the verse if you’d prefer. Try, though, to pinch the first notes of the chord that I’ve written out as it makes for a very nice melodic line to close the song, moving from the open B string to the C note at the first fret to the D note at the third fret and then to the open E of the first string. Once there, use your pinky to get the G note at the third fret of the first string and then slide the pinky up to the seventh fret for the final note. When you’ve reached it, you’ll also play the G note at the third fret of the low E (sixth) string with your index finger. This is a bit of a stretch and normally I wouldn’t think about trying it, but having the capo at the second fret makes this a lot easier and, again, it mimics the slide guitar part played on the original recording.

And now that we have all our pieces in place, let’s try out the whole thing:

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I hope that you’ve hung out and tried the various exercises and techniques involved in this lesson. Part of this, obviously, is meant to both encourage and light a fire under you to get you going on feeling more comfortable with barre chords. Part of it is selfish, as well. We’re going to be doing some lessons in the very near future on Jack Johnson songs that will actually be less involved than what you’ve just accomplished and I don’t want to have to put all of these songs in the “Intermediates” section when you truly would be able to handle them if you simply worked a little on them with some concentrated effort.

Anyway, I also hope that you had fun with it as well. This is a beautiful song that you’ll probably find yourself playing over and over again and wondering what all the fuss about barre chords was about in the first place!

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Just as important, perhaps more so – developing this flexibility will keep you from falling back on the old “must-not-deviate-from-original-strumming-pattern” mentality, which sounds even more ludicrous, by the way, if you can manage to say it with a bit of a James Shatner impression.

Think about this: Most of us pick up the guitar to play songs. If we go out of our way to learn a single part (the strumming guitar) of a song that is done by a whole band, then our playing isn’t going to sound just like the song to begin with. So why get hung up on that when we can usually come up with something a lot more interesting that still sounds like the song we want to play?

Looking at songs as things you can arrange, pardon the pun, will give you the pluck to try out songs that you might dismiss as “beyond” your capabilities. I can’t even begin to tell you how cool it is when you’re listening to a single guitarist perform and he or she totally stuns you by coming up with a song you’ve never heard done before in a single-guitar arrangement.

So without further ado, let’s get down to the task at hand, shall we?

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

In case you didn’t read the title, we’re dipping once again into our Pink Floyd catalogue for this lesson and pulling out the classic ballad Comfortably Numb, originally released on their album The Wall. I’m pretty certain most of you are familiar with the tune, so much so in fact that I’m wondering whether or not I should even discuss the song’s structure.

Better safe than sorry, right? Like our last lesson, Play with Fire, Comfortably Numb is made up of two distinct sections – a “verse” section and a “chorus” section. Some people might like to break the chorus down into two subsections: a “pre-chorus” (starting with the line “…there is no pain…”) and a regular “chorus” (just the final line – “…I have become comfortably numb…”). That seems a little like too much work for me, so we’ll settle for two parts, okay? Laying out the song in the style of a “cheat sheet” or “chord sheet,” and going with very basic chords, it would look like this:

You can see that the two sections have their own chord progressions. The verses are made up of either two or three sets of a Bm – A – G – Em – Bm progression while the chorus goes from D to A twice, C to G twice, back to D and A (again twice) and then back to C and G again (and again, twice). The last line goes from A to C to G and ends on D.

The chorus, beginning with the repeated line of D to A, serves as the backing progression for the first instrumental solo. The last line of the chorus is still sung, though, which leads us back to the verse section again.

Finally, the chord progression of the verse serves as the backing chords for the extended solo of the outro. And that pretty much covers the structure of our song.

Comfortably Numb is played at a rather languid pace; I think it’s around sixty-five beats per minute. This leaves a lot of space for strumming and, during the first verse, Gilmour does very little of it. You can also hear that when he gets to the second Bm (at the point where the lyrics are “…anyone home…”) that he’s not really playing a Bm chord, but something a little more moody and mysterious. Back to that in a moment…

During the second pass at the Verse Section, the strumming is actually more like it was in the chorus section, a bit busier but still steady. Almost like someone managing to get to his feet, perhaps?

Example 1 lays out these two basic strumming patterns for you:

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As you can see and hear, I’ve used the Bm chord for this example but I could have used any of the other chords as well. Speaking of that Bm chord, and we’ve certainly talked about this before, you can use one of three different voicings for it in this song:

The first one is obviously easiest and those of you who are comfortable with the full barre chord version (the third choice) will probably like the way that sounds. I’m going with the second one for now, because of what we’re going to do next. But before we go on, this would be a good place to point out that you can now play this song. Seriously. You’ve got the basic chords and some simple, yet effective, strumming patterns. What more do you need?

Wants, however, are a totally different matter. And we’re working on a single guitar arrangement of our song, perhaps we want to play Comfortably Numb with a few more interesting touches than simply being locked into a strumming pattern throughout the whole tune.

So what I’m proposing is that we take a number of ideas from our various Guitar Noise Podcasts, things like combining strumming and crosspicking (from GN Podcast #8) or even the sixteenth note accent from way back in GN Podcast #4 and put them into play. We can even use a little bit of our bass line work. In fact, if you’ve read the very first lesson on walking bass lines, Connecting the Dots, you’ll see that we’ll put Examples 8 and 10 from that lesson to good use in this one.

Before we do, though, let’s go back and look at the “mysterious” sounding Bm chord that Gilmour plays at the end of the verse progressions. It’s a Bm chord where the D note (third fret of the B string) has been replaced with C# (second fret of the B string), giving what us what most guitarists would call a Bsus2 chord and it would look like this, if you were using the “second choice” voicing of Bm as a starting point;

Alright, then, I think we’re ready to come up with an interesting “template” for the verse chord progression. After doing a bit of playing around and experimenting, I’ve hit upon this:

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That’s certainly a lot more interesting than just strumming around. The first measure starts with a Bm chord, but I’ve left the high E (first) string open so that I can hammer onto the second fret to get the F# note to complete the chord. There’s a bit of sneakiness in that on my part, too. Since that F# note is the note of the start of the melody, I usually find myself trying to find it and often slide up to it from E. So this little hammer-on helps me to find the melody line right from the start. For the third and fourth beats of the measure, I use simple upstroke arpeggios, removing my finger from the high E (first) string again to get a more interesting final arpeggio to contrast with the one of the third beat.

I like the combination of strumming, hammer-ons and arpeggios in the first measure so much that I use it again in the second measure for the A chord. The first beat begins with what some folks call “Asus2,” which is just an A chord with no finger on the B string. I hammer-on the second fret of the B string and also catch the full A chord on the upstroke. And since we’ve been doing okay with the hammer-ons, why not give the pull-offs some equal time? You’ll find one in the last arpeggio that occurs on the fourth beat of this measure.

Since the G to Em transition that occurs in the third measure is dramatic, the easiest thing to do is to emphasize it by keeping the rest of the strumming in this measure relatively sparse. Those of you with sharp ears may hear that I’m sometimes catching a few extra notes on this short descending bass line. This is done by hitting all three of the low strings while playing it:

The thing to watch out for here is that you want to mute the A string when you go for the F# note (second fret of the low E) in the bass. Simply lifting your finger that is already sitting there at the second fret just enough to dampen the A string should do the trick.

Another thing to notice is that we’re what might be a different voicing of the G chord that some of you may not have come across before (although some of you do recognize it, I’m sure, from other lessons here at Guitar Noise). Having the D note (third fret of the B string) allows you to just leave it there when you play your Em. This added D note turns the Em into an Em7, which gives the chord a more interesting feel. You’ll hear on the last MP3 file that I strummed this Em7 chord very close to the bridge of the guitar, giving the strum a little more of a ‘ghostly” effect. Using a technique such as this every now and then can also make a song more interesting to your listeners. Not to mention to yourself!

Because the third measure is practically all strumming, it kind of makes sense to follow that up with a measure that is nothing but single picked notes. In my playing around, I discovered that I liked the arpeggios I could create by leaving the high E (first) string open while playing the Bsus2. This creates another weird chord that I’ve chosen to call “Bsus2sus4″ just to keep the “Dadd2add4″ used in our Easy Songs for Beginners lesson on Man on the Moon company. If you finger the chord using your ring finger on the fourth fret of the D string, your pinky on the fourth fret of the G string and your index finger on second fret of the B, that will free up your index finger to perform the hammer-on and pull-off at the third fret of the B string.

So far, so good? As always, it’s important to note here that this “template” is merely a suggestion. There is no end to the ideas that you can come up with and while you’re playing you may certainly come across more than one or two that sound good. It also goes without saying that there’s no reason to make things more complicated than you have to. If you can only sing while strumming simply, and if you’re the only one singing and playing, then you have to go with what you’re capable of. But do yourself a favor and keep trying out adding little touches here and there. As you gain more confidence in your abilities, you’ll find yourself able to put your practice into your performance.

And this is important to remember when we get to the chorus. If I’m not handling the singing duties when playing, I like to use the guitar to add the wonderful keyboard arpeggios that are part of the hook of the chorus. When singing, though, that makes thing a bit difficult. Sometimes a compromise is in order.

For instance, the notes of the D arpeggio in the first measure of the chorus, along with the tablature you’ll often find both online and in “guitar tablature edition” books of Pink Floyd music are:

This certainly sounds fine. But if you’re more partial to the sound of ringing strings, you might find this interpretation of the same notes more up your alley:

You might recognize this particular voicing of the D chord from many of our other song lessons and articles here at Guitar Noise. For more about figuring out how to come up with a different chord voicing yourself, check out Moving On Up or Multiple Personality Disorders; both articles are certainly worthy of your attention. The easiest way to finger this, by the way, is to use your index finger for the fifth fret of the high E (first) string, your pinky on the seventh fret of the B string and your ring finger on seventh fret of the G string.

And we’ve not mentioned it yet, but if you decide to play Comfortably Numb on a twelve-string guitar (no reason not to!), this particular technique will sound very cool.

Back to the point – borrowing the lines from the keyboard is a great idea, but if you’re not able to handle it and sing, there’s no reason to abandon it all together. After all, during each of the measures of A, you’re only singing on the first beat. Likewise the first two measures of G in the chorus section. So, strumming the D’s and C’s while playing arpeggios on the A’s and G’s should work out fine. In the following example, I’ve written out each of the chord changes as arpeggios, but on the MP3 you’ll hear the example played twice – once with all arpeggios and once with alternating strumming and arpeggios:

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The A and G arpeggios vary slightly from the original recording. Actually the A is an exact copy of the second pass on the recording while the G is different in that I’ve changed the notes used in order to take the best advantage of the guitar’s two open high strings. If you’re playing with someone who’s got that part covered, then you obviously don’t have to worry about it. If you’re on your own, might as well make things easier on you. Chances are likely that if I hadn’t told you it was different, you might not have even noticed. You’re still using the flavor of the song and that will often carry you through.

For the second pass through the D, A, D, A, C, G, C, G of the chorus, I want to give the music more of a push, so I go for all strumming (and these are all just slight variations of the “possible chorus” strumming from Example 1) but I punch things up by adding a sixteenth note accent at the last half of the fourth beat of the previous measure, like this:

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Again, and you’re undoubtedly tired of hearing this by now, this is also just a suggestion. You can use these sixteenth note accents in combination with arpeggios or with different strumming patterns or not use them at all. This is, after all, your call as arranger. You are the one who knows what you can (or can’t) play at this point in your guitar playing adventure.

You might also hear in the last MP3 example that I manage to find the melody notes of the very last phrase of lyric (“…have become comfortably numb…”) in much the same way we found the melody line of Play with Fire. To accomplish this, I need to change the last C to Cadd9, which means adding the pinky to the third fret of the B string in order to get the D note of the melody. And then, after a bit of careful picking with the G chord, I finished things off with first a partial D chord, using just the A, D and G strings, and then a full D, strummed as close to the bridge of the guitar as possible in order to quiet things down a bit for the second verse.

And that’s pretty much everything. You’re good to go! I hope you’ve had fun with this lesson. The main thing to remember is that Comfortably Numb is a song where your playing carries a lot of emotional weight, so why sit on a robotic strumming pattern that displays none?

And for those who noticed that I totally ignored the solo between the first chorus and the second verse, don’t worry. Time permitting (although that might mean sometime after August), I will write out a single guitar arrangement for that to help you out.

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

As a guitarist, as a musician, I know that the ability to be flexible, to change from strumming to a single-note crosspicking pattern or to change from full chords to partial chords or even to chord melody style in midstream can make a big difference in how a song comes across. So even when I’m learning a specific technique, part of me is thinking about how to be able to turn that new technique on and off at will and how to be able to integrate it into what I already can do.

None of that, by the way, is supposed to make you wonder whether or not this particular lesson is going to be harder than the usual “Easy Songs for Beginners” Lessons here at Guitar Noise. Far from it! Rather, I just want to prepare you for doing something you’ve not tried before and while it is something fairly simple and easy, it may take a little getting used to!

So onward then, shall we?

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Today’s selected lesson is Play With Fire, originally the “B” side of The Last Time, released almost exactly forty-four years ago (don’t get me started about where the time goes!). It’s a spare, acoustic song that will lend itself well to some interesting arranging work, using an interesting technique that essentially reverses the way you’re probably most used to playing guitar as yet. Hang in there and I’ll hopefully explain along the way.

In terms of structure, Play With Fire is about as simple as they come. There’s a verse section and a chorus. The chorus also serves as the introduction and as an interlude between the second and third verse. And you repeat the chorus a second time at the end, so I guess you could also think of it as the outro. It’s in 4 / 4 timing at a moderate pace of, say, one hundred and twelve beats per minute. And there are only four chords – Em, G, D and C.

To make matters easier, the entire verse, all eight measures of it, is sung over an Em chord. So you could take a simple strumming pattern, like this one I conveniently have here:

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With this we can do the whole song. Remember that the verse is eight measures (four beats each) of Em. The chorus starts out with two beats of G, then two beats of D, then two more beats of G, two beats of C and finally eight beats (two measures) of Em:

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Not much of a lesson, is it?

So where shall we start? This may seem like old hat to some of you, and I’m sure you’re tired of hearing me say it, but the melody of a song is almost always a great place to find ideas and inspiration. And this song is, probably not surprisingly, not an exception. In fact, if we look at the melody line and see how it fits on the guitar, we may make an interesting discovery:

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Guess what? There are only four melody notes and two of them are open strings! And here’s another gift – the two non-open-string notes, D (third fret of the B string) and G (third fret of the high E (first) string) are easily reached when playing an E minor chord. So let’s try and go about fitting them into our chord pattern. We could choose many ways to do this, such as in the following examples. By the way, these snippets only use the first two lines (four measures) of the verse in order to give you a taste:

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Our “first idea” is a typical beginner chord melody approach, pretty much going with a full chord strum with each melody note. A little heavy handed, but it works.

The “second idea” actually borrows from the original recording, using the Travis picking / pinch technique we’ve discussed in several relatively recent articles. It’s actually a lot sparser than even the original recording, but should be easy enough for you to get a handle on. First just use your thumb to get used to alternating between the open low E (sixth) string and the E note at the second fret of the D string every beat. Then add in the melody, using either your index or middle finger. Or you can use both fingers to play the melody notes, playing any note on the high E (first) string with your middle finger and any note on the B string with your index.

And if the style of the “third idea: seems familiar, it’s because we’ve used that in our After the Gold Rush lesson (and good for you, by the way, for venturing into the Intermediate Song Lessons page! Some of them are not as hard as you think they might be). We’re going to go with this one for today’s lesson because while it may sound easy, it’s going to take a little bit getting used to.

There are two main reasons I want to use this technique. First, it’s even and steady. You probably heard in the last example that it takes a few liberties with the timing of the melody line and that’s okay here because we’re not strictly playing a chord melody style. We’re actually the accompaniment and someone should be singing. Shadowing the melody in this fashion allows a bit of tension between the voice and the accompaniment, letting the voice weave in and out between the beats while we’re keeping things smooth and steady on the guitar.

The second reason is that we can use some of the pauses of the melody to play short arpeggio fills, especially at the end of the fourth and eighth measures. We’ll also tack on a short walking bass line at the very end of the verse, leading from E to F# on the low E (sixth) string, which will take us to the G note that will start the chorus.

Basically the “third idea” takes the familiar “bass note / chord” style of playing that we’ve used in lessons like Folsom Prison Blues and turns it around. We play the chord or partial chord on the higher strings first right on the beat and then add our bass note, which is usually the root note of the chord on the offbeat. Now here’s the tricky part: the easiest way to play this is to start with an upstroke. Instead of the typical down-up-down-up pattern that we play without thinking, we’re going to have to reverse our stroke. So do yourself a favor and start out slowly. Here we go:

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Again, I can’t stress enough to take things slowly. Only work the first two measures for starters. Once you’re comfortable with playing in this manner, then add the third measure (which should be a snap since it’s a repeat of the first one) and then tackle the fourth measure. It’s a very simple Em arpeggio, you don’t even have to lift your fingers, just go straight down the strings one at a time and then back to the B string. The last two notes again mirror the melody at that point of the song.

This may seem like a very minor thing, almost an afterthought really, but here you’re learning to snap out of your pattern, to take a (very) short deviation before getting back to it. This is the flexibility I was talking about at the very beginning of this lesson. At first it will seem weird but you’ll get better at it with each pass.

Speaking of mirroring the melody, we’re going to do the same thing in the chorus, but this time we’ll place the melody all the way down in the bass notes of the guitar and add some basic straight arpeggios:

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Using the melody line as our bass puts us in a sort of “good news / bad news” scenario. The good news is that the initial G chord, as well at the G/B at the start of the second measure, are essentially one-fingered chords. If we’re careful with our picking, we can play both these chords using only one finger. The C chord at the last half of the second measure also poses no problems.

That means the bad news is the D chord at the end of the first measure. Technically, it’s got the A note of the open A string as our combination melody-and-bass note and we could make this easier on ourselves by using D5/A, which is fingered exactly like your regular open position D only you don’t play either E string (X0023X).

But this is a lesson and you’re supposed to be learning new things and taking on new challenges, so I’ve made the decision of playing a D chord with the F# note at the third fret of the D string. Probably the easiest way to finger this for most of you will be to use your ring finger for this F# note while your index finger gets the A (second fret of the G string) and your middle finger plays the D (third fret of the B string). And there’s a nice little arpeggio at the end that uses a pull-off from that D note on the B string to the open B string itself.

As mentioned earlier, the chorus, besides just being the chorus, is also used as the introduction and as an interlude, a (very) short instrumental break between the second and third verses. Plus the chorus is done twice after the fourth verse.

I have no qualms about using the chorus as the introduction; it’s distinctive and anyone who knows the song will be able to figure out what I’m playing. But playing it a total of seven times (four times with each of the four verses, plus as an introduction, an interlude and an outro) seems a bit much. We only do the verses four times, and that’s a lot!

So why not come up with a different arrangement for the chorus that can be used for the interlude and outro? And why not use the same style of “chord / bass note” playing that we’ve been doing so well with so far in the verses? Maybe something like this:

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The first line here you should recognize as the end of the chorus. It’s there because, at least according to the song structure we’re using, we’ll be playing this after the second verse and chorus and then again after the fourth verse and chorus. So it makes sense to see how it ties into the song. The F# note (fourth fret of the D string) is the pick-up note; if we were singing it would be the syllable “don’t” right before the “play” that starts the chorus.

Normally making the stretch to the fourth fret of the D string might be a tad worrisome, but remember that the note immediately before it is the open low E (sixth) string. That gives us plenty of time to move our fingers to be in place.

We’ll use the same chords that we did for the first chorus, but this time we’ll pick them in the same style that we use for the majority of the verses. Because the initial melody notes are on the G string, we’ll have to be a bit careful with our upstroke, making certain we miss the high E (first) and B strings. As I said, this is a lesson, so where would we be without techniques to practice?

And speaking of new things, there’s that pesky D/A again. Use the same fingering that you did on the regular chorus. It should work nicely. And if you truly are having a hard time, remember that the D5/A chord discussed earlier (X0023X) is still an option.

Finally, it’s no secret to anyone who’s heard me play that I am a big fan of using harmonics. So getting in a couple of natural harmonics, found at the twelfth fret of the B and high E (first) string, at the very end of this phrase sounds good to me. You can, as always, feel free to omit them if you’d like.

Alright, then, you’re good to go! Don’t forget that, as with all our song lessons here at Guitar Noise, this is meant to be a template, a starting point from which you can play around and experiment with different variations of your own choosing. You’ll soon get to the point where you’ll want to incorporate more of the syncopation from the verses, which means making some appropriate adjustments in the rest of your strumming pattern. You’ll hear a little bit of that in this final MP3:

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I hope you’ve had fun with this lesson. Coming right on the heels of Hey There Delilah, it’s almost like taking two steps forward, then taking two exact steps in reverse yet still ending up four steps ahead of where you started!

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Likewise with the word “easy.” If you have read any of our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons here at Guitar Noise, you have hopefully learned (or at least strongly suspected) that we would like you to learn things besides the songs being taught in these lessons. The songs are usually, in fact, delivery vehicles for the use of music theory or various guitar techniques that you are encouraged to use in all your playing.

Bearing that in mind, I’d like to also borrow something that I wrote in our last issue of Guitar Noise News, the free twice-a-month newsletter of Guitar Noise, dated January 16, 2009:

Something that I should let you know right from the start, though, is that there is no set order or “lesson plan” when it comes to the articles and lessons at Guitar Noise. You see, the odd thing (or one of the odd things) about our website is that it didn’t start out to be a tutorial site. Just kind of grew into one. When I first started writing here (back in 1999), the object was to write about what people asked for or seemed interested in.

Because of this, we don’t have a “lesson plan,” and yes, we know that makes things a little difficult. Problem is, with over two million readers a month, it’s hard to write for everyone’s specific desires.

The “Easy Songs for Beginners” are numbered, but that’s strictly chronological. And I’ve been adding new lessons, such as Eleanor Rigby and Folsom Prison Blues/Your Cheatin’ Heart, that can easily fit in between some of the very earliest lessons.

I do try, whenever and wherever possible, to add other lessons for “cross referencing.” but you should always feel free to write and ask if it seems like you’ve missed a page in the discussion at hand.

So I guess the upshot of all this, big surprise, is that some things a beginner goes through are going to be harder than others. Some people pick up on some techniques and ideas faster than others; it stands to reason that some “Beginners” lessons will be harder for some people than others. And some that may seem beyond one’s grasp may come fairly quickly with a little bit of (gasp!) practice and work. There’s a cool flip side to this – some of you may find that certain of the “Songs for Intermediates” lessons are nowhere near as difficult as you may be thinking they are. This is one reason why I always encourage students to reach out and try songs and techniques that might be currently beyond their levels. As long as one doesn’t get frustrated in the attempt, it almost always yields positive results, although those results may be a bit down the road.

And that bring us to today’s lesson, Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T’s. As a song lesson, this tune gives us a chance to develop some picking techniques that will be very helpful to beginners whether they use fingers or picks. Plus there are a few tricky chord changes that, once you’ve gotten them into your fingers, can give you a lot of confidence for trickier ones that you’ll undoubtedly come across at some point in your guitar lives. It might even give you a reason to try some of the Intermediate song lessons here at Guitar Noise.

So let’s get on with it, shall we?

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

This might be a good time to mention that another reason this song is a good exercise is that the rhythm is constant throughout. Every measure, with one or two exceptions, will be filled with eight eighth notes that alternate between a bass note and a partial chord using just the G and B strings. So it’s also a good way to work on your string-picking accuracy.

Hey There Delilah starts out with a short introduction and then has a fairly standard song structure of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, final verse and chorus. It’s in 4/4 timing and it’s played in the key of D major. The verses themselves are easily broken down into two sections of chord progressions. The first section, which is a measure of D and then one of F#m, is also used as the introduction:

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And, as you can hear in the first MP3 file, it sounds fine whether you use your fingers or a pick. Some people may like using both thumb and fingers on the partial chords, some may like the “one finger sweep,” that is, using one finger and striking both the B and G strings on the upstroke. I’ll be using the “two fingers” approach for the rest of this lesson, simply because I prefer the way it sounds.

Another thing to mention here is that, technically, we’re playing a D5 chord instead of a full D, so you don’t have to finger the entire open D chord and can leave the first (high E) string open.

Speaking of fingering, this simple progression might prove to be one of the more challenging parts of this song for some of you. And if you don’t mind a suggestion, try laying your index finger flat in a “mini-barre,” covering the first three strings at the second fret. This way you won’t have to move very much to make the change between these two chords. I usually use my ring finger to get the D note (third fret of the B string) on the D5 chord and then my pinky to get the F# note (fourth fret, D string) on the F#m. Those of you with larger hands may prefer to employ your middle and ring fingers, respectively, for those tasks, but since this progression lasts a while, I find it helps to have my middle finger help support the index finger in the barre by lying on top of it!

I really want to stress that even though this progression may seem hard at first, you will get it with practice, persistence and patience. And there’s every reason to get good at this as you’ll find this particular fingering shape used a lot, both in chording and lead guitar work, not to mention many chord melody arrangements. So please keep at it!

But if you want immediate gratification, then you can use the “alternate F#m choice” shown in Example 1A. Wrapping your thumb around to get the F# bass note at the second fret of the low E (sixth) string is probably the easiest way for most folks to get this.

The second section of the verse is four measures long and moves from Bm to G to A, and then back to Bm and A again. The good news here, because of this particular picking pattern, is that we don’t have to deal with any type of barring in regard to the Bm chord. Oh! There’s also a slight descending walking bass line at the end of the first measure, which most guitarists prefer to think of as Bm/A;

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And it’s really interesting to wonder why we’d call it a Bm/A at all since we’re only playing the A note in the bass instead of playing both the bass note and then the rest of the chord! Of course, you’ll hear me make the mistake of playing the rest of the chord anyway on one of the MP3 files. That’s why it’s always a good idea to have your chord shapes in place even if you’re not planning on hitting those strings.

The trickiest part here is the final A5. Since you’re all into reading music and / or you know your fretboards fairly well, then you already have figured out that the E note on the fifth fret of the B string is the same E note as your open high E (first) string. So you can certainly just hit that note if you’d rather. But going with that mini-barre on the second fret will allow you to both get the fifth fret of the B string with your pinky and still be in great shape for when you get back to the D5 that starts the second half of the verse.

And speaking of the second half of the verse, why don’t we put an entire verse together so that you can see how they work:

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So far, so good! The chorus consists of a two chord progression of D5 to Bm and tosses in some bass movement to make things a little more interesting:

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Not only does it make things more interesting, but using only the open A note in the bass for the D5/A is as convenient a gift for your fingering that you could ever hope for! It gives you a nice quiet moment in order to get your fingers set for the two upcoming Bm chords.

Here, I’d like to suggest not using the mini-barre on the D5. Fret the D note (third fret of the B string) with your middle finger and play the A (second fret of the G string) with your index. When you hit the open A string, reposition your index finger to play the B note in the bass (second fret of the A string) and also get your pinky set to play the B note on the fourth fret of the G string. This will free up your ring finger to get the C# note in the Bm/C# that’s coming along. There are certainly other ways to try this, but I think most of you will find this to be the easiest.

This two-measure chord progression is played four times in the chorus. The first time through the chorus ends with one last measure of D5 (along with the D5/A) before going back to the verse chords.

The second time through the chorus there is a slight change at the end of it, using Bm/A instead of Bm/C#. This leads us from B down to G, which happens to be the chord that starts out the bridge:

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The bridge of Hey There Delilah is an excellent example of the sort of simple bass lines you add to almost any song in the key of D major or B minor. Those of you who’ve read our articles on walking bass lines here at Guitar Noise probably recognize this as what I like to call “connecting the dots,” simply moving from one root note to the next. Be careful, though! Notice that while the first shift from D5 to Bm involves the same D5/A used in the chorus, the second time D5/C# comes into play. This might be another good time to use your mini-barre, which should give your pinky ample room to get that C# note in the bass.

I’m beginning to wonder if I should have made the mini-barre itself the focal point of the lesson, especially since you’ll want to use it again at the end of the third verse. As mentioned ages ago, the last verse is slightly different in structure than the others. It’s nothing you can’t handle, though, as long as you read it carefully:

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Here we go through pretty much the first half of the verse only to get caught in a Bm to Bm/A to G to A loop for a little bit. Finally, though, we get out to the Bm, A and A5 progression that ends the verse. Be sure to notice that both the last A and A5 get a full four beats each instead the two they had in the previous verses.

The final chorus is also longer. It starts out the same but continues on for an additional five times while the vocal is singing a lot of “ohs” and “whoas” and whatnot. In addition, occasionally the guitarist throws in a bit of a string mute on the last half of the fourth beat of the first measure, where the D5/A is played:

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Not every one of the last five times, but a few of them. You truly don’t have to play them at all, but it’s also a cool little technique that you should get into practicing sooner rather than later. And the whole thing ends on your regular garden variety open position D chord.

I hope you’ve had fun with this lesson. There is a bit to digest here and some of it is going to require some work and patience, not to mention practice! But these are the sort of techniques and little touches that you’re going to run into time and time again in your adventures with the guitar, so having a cheerful little pop song to work them out with isn’t all that bad of a thing, is it?

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

This sort of show is actually something that happens a lot to me, so I’ve learned that it’s good to know a lot of songs that (a) sound good for a group and (b) can be learned in a hurry. As I was putting together a list of possible songs for this particular outing and asking the players for suggestions, Nick’s listed R.E.M.’s Man on the Moon as a song he wanted to try. I’d done a cover of this in a number of solo shows and realizes it would certainly be a good song for the show.

And it also might make a good “Easy Songs for Beginners” lesson here on Guitar Noise. It has an interesting use of a movable chord, a good steady strumming pattern, and it lends itself nicely to some “follow the melody” touches that even beginners should be able to handle. Also you can learn a trick about changing chords in a relatively quick pattern. So if you’re ready, let’s get going…

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Dealing With The Obvious Question

If you look up a tab or chord chart for Man on the Moon on the Internet, the first question that you usually ask comes very quickly. The second chord, depending on who wrote the tablature, is usually listed as “Dadd4add2.” Sometimes it’s listed as “Dsus2sus4.” Every once and awhile you may even see “D11 (no 7).” Any of these chords certainly deserves a cock of the eyebrow.

The reality is that what we’re dealing with is what I consider a “guitar-centric” chord. Kind of like the second chord of Horse with no Name, the one that’s not Em. Basically, you’ve taken a familiar open chord guitar shape and simply shifted it someplace else on the neck of the guitar.

Do me a favor and participate in this demonstration: Play your standard open position C chord. Your ring finger is on the third fret of the A string, your middle finger sits on the second fret of the D and your index finger plays the first fret of the B. Are you with me so far? Good! Now slide each finger two frets up the neck. Should look like this:

Congratulations! You have just formed the “Dadd2add4″ chord. That’s all there is too it.

Well, there’s always more, if you want there to be! So let me add that some folks find this optional fingerings a bit more pleasant to their ears:

To get this voicing, start with your basic C chord, but use your pinky in place of the ring finger on the third fret of the A string. When you’ve done this, put your ring finger on the third fret of the low E (sixth) string. Technically, this is what most people would refer to as “C/G,” that is a C chord with the G note in the bass. Let’s not waste a lot, or any, time on this today, though, okay? To get the “bassier” Dadd2add4, slide all four fingers two frets higher.

For the sake of our lesson today, we’re going to call this pesky Dadd2add4 chord by the name of “D*” Is everyone okay with that? Good. Then here’s a cheat sheet for our song. I’ll meet up with you on the other side:

Strumming and Verses

You’ve probably already noticed that there’s nothing here you can’t handle, especially now that we’ve dealt with the whole “D*” chord thing. How about a nice strumming pattern and you can get going on things:

Of course, you’re probably already thinking that this hasn’t been all that much of a lesson. And you’re right. So let’s take a look at some of the things that we can do, incredibly simple, almost casual, touches that add magic to a song. Why not start with the verse strumming we just looked at?

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This touch is so minor you may not have even seen it, but you can certainly hear it in the MP3 sound file. All we’re doing it lifted our middle finger off the D string for the fourth beat of the third measure. That’s tthe third “yeah” of the “yeah yeah yeah yeah” if you’re singing along. This creates a “Cadd9″ chord, which some folks will call “Cadd2″ or even “C2″ (for some reason, you see a lot of “C2″ and other “2″ chords in the sheet music of contemporary gospel music – not really sure why) and, while I’ve noted it as “Cadd9″ on the example, I’d like you to start getting in the habit of thinking of it as “keeping busy during a lengthy C chord.” Seriously. While it’s important to know music theory (and I hope to heaven that everyone who reads any lesson at Guitar Noise knows that this is a bit of an understatement, especially coming from me), it’s also important to start going beyond what you’re given in any chord sheet. Don’t always wait for direction when it comes to chords; don’t be afraid to try things. If you’ve not been listening to our Guitar Noise Podcasts, which deal a lot with this sort of thing, then you might want to give one a try.

Back to our Man on the Moon. The verses pretty much consist of this same chord change over and over again. And the first verse is six lines long, while the second and third are both four lines long. Michael Stipe, who sings lead for R.E.M. was smart and made small variations on the melody line in the verses, so why not take a cue from him:

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Here we’re playing a different voicing of our open C chord by adding our pinky to the third fret of the high E (first) string. That G note being prominent on the high string definitely gets a bit of notice. We follow that up with a regular open position D for the second measure. Because we’ve not used a regular D chord yet (they’ve all been “D*” chords up ‘til this point), it doesn’t sound the least bit mundane. If fact, it’s kind of downright refreshing!

We’re back to the regular C chord in the third measure, but we even change this by going with a “Cadd4″ during that last beat. Easiest way to finger this is to just add the pinky to the third fret of the D string. If you want to try something even wilder, might I suggest this:

In case you’re wondering why I didn’t just call this “Cadd4add6″ an Fmaj7, consider that I’m simply having a weird day.

Anticipation, Melody Lines and the Pre-Chorus

When we get to the gorgeous “pre-chorus” of our song, the part that starts, “…Andy did you hear about this one…” we get to do some fun, although slightly complicated things. First off, I should explain that I came up with this particular arrangement when I was performing this song solo. When I play it with other people, or when I hear it being played, my initial tendency is to sing (attempt to sing) a harmony part here. This section just demands harmony. But when you’re doing a solo act, there’s no harmony. Worse, if you start singing the harmony, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to get back to where you want to be later.

So, rather than abandon the melody, why not reinforce it?

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There are a lot of things going on here, so let me try to tackle them one at a time. First and foremost, there’s the melody line. You’ll notice that even on the first chord of the pre-chorus, the Am, I only strum down to the B string, where my finger is sitting on the first fret. That C note is the melody note. I stop my strum there to emphasize the note and then also play the rest of the melody line on the B and G strings of the guitar.

This is certainly not something you have to do; you can just strum the whole song the way you’ve been doing during the verse. But it isn’t all that hard to do. It just requires taking a bit of care in your strumming. In fact, it’s very much like we did in our lesson on Like A Hurricane or even Silent Night. Take your time with it and remember two things: work within the chord shapes and take it as slowly as you need to start. Worry about speed once you’ve got the fingering and the notes down.

The thing that may truly take a little getting used to is the sense of timing. The first and third lines each hang on for a half-beat longer than you might think, while the second line ends a half-beat sooner. These are all forms of anticipation, a topic that we’ve covered in many a lesson here at Guitar Noise.

Also notice that in the second measure of the first and third lines we add a C note to the mix, in essence creating a “Gsus4″ chord. This is a tiny touch and (again) one you can certainly do without. But it does add more to the general strumming, as does the quick use of the G note (third fret, high E (first) string) on the D chord in the last measure. And yes, you can think of that as Dsus4 if you want to. As I mentioned earlier, these are little things that can help make normal strumming more interesting. It’s not so much a change of pattern as it is a subtle change of the chord itself. We’ll see more of this in the section ahead on the Interlude.

The “Quick Change” Chorus and The Interlude

The chorus provides us with the quickest chord changes of the song, coming at every two beats throughout most of this section. But it also provides with a “guitar-centric” way of dealing with them as well:

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This is a great example of how reading tablature can lure you into all sorts of traps. Could you tell, just with a glance at the first two measures, exactly what’s going on? It looks like a lot of movement. But look again after I tell you this: You’re going to play the chord twice. Downstroke on the first beat. Then downstroke on the second beat. When you come up on the second beat, just take your fingers off the strings and hit some of the open ones. Use that moment to change your chord for the next downstroke.

Okay, look at the tablature again. Can you see this? It certainly makes the quick changes a lot easier, especially for a beginner, doesn’t it? One of the reasons this works is because this song is in the key of G and if you hit the open B, G and D strings, well that’s a G chord. Those notes are also extensions of other chords in this particular progression.

But you’ll find this technique used by a lot of artists even in songs that aren’t in the key of G. Jack Johnson, just to name someone off the top of my head, does this sort of thing a lot in his music, even in keys that kind of sound weird when you rely on open strings to help you through a chord change.

In the second measure of the second line, you’ll find us using an “uncredited” Dsus4 right before the fourth beat. Then, in the second measure of the third line, we do a descending walking bass line from C to C/B to the Am which begins the fourth line. This might remind you of the same sort of short bass lines we worked on in the lesson on As Tears Go By.

That Am starting the fourth line, by the way, leads to another round of “follow the melody line.” When you start the Am chord at the third beat of that measure, leave your index finger off and then hammer it onto the first fret to go from the open B string to the C note. From that point, it’s just a matter of keeping the rest of the Am chord intact and opening up the G string at the right moment.

Finally, there are two “interludes,” if you will, in Man on the Moon, where there is an instrumental break. This is where the slide solo takes place between the second chorus and the third verse, as well as between the third chorus and a closing two repetitions of the chorus. The final chorus, by the bye, ends on a resounding Em chord. Make note of that.

For the solo guitarist, there’s not a lot of time to do very fancy playing, so going with some chordal variations seems to be a simple way of having something interesting to play during these sections:

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Here we’re adding a D note to the Em chord, creating an Em7, and we’re also using the open high E (sixth) string in with the D chord to produce a Dadd9 or “Dsus2″ if you prefer. We’ve also done a slight variation on our strumming between these two chords so that the slight changes of the chords occur on different beats in their respective measures. Is that absolutely necessary? Of course not, but it does make things sound a little more interesting. And since we’ve an additional measure of D to deal with, it kind of made sense to use a totally different voicing than any of the others we’ve used up until this point. The easiest fingering for this is to use your index finger on the high E (sixth) string, your pinky on the B string and your ring finger on the G.

Another thing you can do to make this transition a little smoother, and this isn’t notated in the example, is to hit the open strings on the final beat of the D chord to give yourself the time to get further up the neck.

Okay, let’s hear all the different parts played together, shall we?

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I hope you’ve had fun with this lesson. Some of it is going to require some work and patience, but I’m sure you can pull it off. We’ll be using this song in the future when we start looking at adding second (or third or fourth) guitar parts when playing in a group situation.

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

At some point in your guitar life, and pardon the pun, you’re going to have to come to grips with barre chords. If you play acoustic guitar, the thought of barre chords can scare you silly. But they, pretty much like everything concerning the guitar (and music), are just another skill that you’ll develop with time. Like anything, the more you practice them, the more confidence you’ll have.

I have to admit, though, I personally tend to avoid barre chords for the most part. My first guitar was a twelve-string and I have smallish hands, so I learned a lot of ways of getting around these somewhat dreaded chords. My fear of barre chords is probably one of the major reasons that I know so many different chord voicings and chord substitutions that I do. Not to mention giving me a lot of practice with capoing and transposing in my head!

So let’s take a song that uses a few barre chords, maybe two, three tops, and work out a lesson. And, to give you a sporting chance, we’ll use a song where you can cheat around the barre chords while you’re learning them. After all, we want to play, right?

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

This lesson’s song in question is Help! by the Beatles. In addition to working with barre chords, we’ll also take our usual look at the nuances of single guitar arrangements, as well as learning a nifty little guitar riff. And, just to be a total pain, how about a walking bass line, albeit a very tiny one? Oh yes, we might also learn a thing or two about music and music theory and how it all pertains to the guitar. Some habits die hard, I guess. Anyway, let’s get started, shall we?

Verses, Chords and Strumming (in some order)

Help! is structured in the following manner: it begins with an introduction and then goes into the first verse, followed by the chorus. The chorus, as we’ll see, is simply a variation of the introduction. After the first verse and chorus comes the second verse (with chorus) and then a repetition of the first verse (again, with chorus). Finally, there is a short outro to end the song.

The key of the original recording is A major. The verses are made up of two eight-measure phrases, using the chord progression of A (two measures), C#m (two measures), F#m (two measures), D (two beats), G (two beats), and A again (one measure). This eight measure phrase is repeated to make up the second half of the verse.

Before we get to the chords, let’s take a look at the strumming. If you listen to the original recording, you’ll hear John Lennon’s acoustic guitar playing not one single strumming pattern, but rather numerous variations of what could be considered a single pattern. Here are some of the rhythms he uses (and please notice that I’m using “slash” notation to mark out the rhythm – that way you don’t have to get confused by reading lots of notes!):

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As you can see (and hear), these various patterns have similarities, but are definitely different. For the most part, the first two beats of any given measure are quarter note downstrokes while the remaining two beats are some combination of quarter notes, eighth notes, ties or rests. The song certainly doesn’t suffer from not having one strict strumming pattern. To the contrary, it sounds organic and lively.

What you might want to do at this stage is to get comfortable playing any of these rhythms that appeal to you. Then work at combining different ones, to the point that you’re not even thinking about switching from one to another. I know it sounds a bit like voodoo, but you want to get so that these variations in patterns just happen seemingly by their own accord.

Since these four examples are each two measures long, another thought would be to “splice” them together differently. For instance, follow the first measure of “Pattern 1″ with the second measure of “Pattern 3″ or the second measure of “Pattern 4.” You can see you’ve got a lot of choices.

An even further test is to see if you can play any combination of these rhythms while holding a conversation. If so, then you’re well on your way to being able to sing and play at the same time.

A quick note before we move on to the chords: one variation that you might find very helpful, not only here in Help! but with other songs as well, is to try out a “bass/strum” style. That is, you’d hit the root note of the chord you’re playing on the first beat instead of the full chord, as in this example:

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It may seem like a small thing but, as you’ll find when we look at some of these chords in a moment, playing in this style can buy you a moment or two to get the rest of your chord in place. It never hurts to think about these things! And it will be very important when dealing with the barre chords we’ll be using. This particular pattern, by the way, you’ll hear a lot in the MP3 examples. It seemed to be a “default” setting for my strumming when I was recording this lesson…

Okay, on to our chords. As I noted earlier, in the verses we’ve got A, C#m, F#m, D and G. On the original recording, C#m and F#m are played as full barre chords, like this:

Even if you’ve never made a barre chord in your life, you hopefully will recognize these chord shapes (and if you want to read more on chord shapes and learn where they come from, check out this old guitar column: But Then Again…). And if you don’t, don’t worry. That’s why we’re here!

Let’s start by making an open position Am chord, like this:

If you’re like most people, you’ve got your index finger on the first fret of the B string, your ring finger on the second fret of the G and your middle finger sitting on the second fret of the D string. Are we good with that?

What we want to do next is to rearrange our fingering of this chord so that we aren’t using our index finger. So, the middle finger replaces the index finger at the first fret of the B string and your pinky takes the ring finger’s former position (the second fret of the G string) so that the ring finger can place itself on the second fret of the D string. With this fingering, your index finger is totally free. And that will allow it to perform the barre for the barre chord. Are you ready?

There are essential two ways to go about this and we’re going to want to look at both, for reasons that will hopefully become obvious. I’d like to suggest that you start with the Am chord and move it up the neck until your fingers are sitting in the fifth and sixth frets and then place your index finger across the strings at the fourth fret. That placement of the index finger is the “barre.” Here’s a breakdown:

In essence, what we’ve done is to move the Am chord four frets up the neck. Each fret is one half-step higher in pitch, so when we moved up one fret we moved the Am chord to A#m (also called Bbm). Two frets higher up the neck we had Bm (which we’re going to need very shortly), three frets higher we had Cm and now that we’re four frets up we’ve got C#m.

A couple of things you want to remember about barring – first off, this is going to be new, so give yourself time to get it. Most people, especially on acoustic guitars, need quite a bit of practice before they feel even slightly comfortable with making a barre chord.

Secondly, with this particular shape where the root note (C#) is on the fifth (A) string, you really only need to get the tip of your index finger onto the string. A typical beginner approach is to get as much of the index finger to cover the barre as possible, usually jamming the neck of the guitar totally into the little webbing between one’s index finger and thumb. There’s simply no way you’ll be able to finger the rest of the chord if the tip of your index finger is way beyond the sixth (low E) string.

Third, as impossible as this is going to sound, relax! Even though we want, ideally, to be able to strum each string and get a clean, clear note, you actually don’t need to turn your index finger and thumb into a vice that has a death grip on the neck of your guitar. Experiment a bit and see just how much pressure you do need and then work on relaxing even more. It’s about finger placement, and that’s part of the paradox – the goal is, obviously, to lay your index finger flat across the strings. But if you take a look at your index finger, and it doesn’t have to be that close of a look, the chances are likely that it’s far from flat. So your initial concern is going to be finding the “sweet spot” for your finger. And that sweet spot is likely to change depending on the type of barre chord you’re playing.

Once you’re somewhat comfortable with the C#m, let’s try to form an F#m. We’ll use the same steps, only this time we’ll start with an Em chord and then move it up two frets on the neck like this:

For this, you may find it a lot easier to use your ring and pinky fingers, leaving your middle finger free to tell your teacher what you think of this exercise. When your F#m chord is in place, the pinky will be on the fourth fret of the D string and the ring finger will be on the fourth fret of the A string.

Many people find a “root six” barre chord (where the root note, F# in this case, is played on the sixth (low E) string) easier than a “root five” barre chord, such as the C#m we just played. For some it’s just the opposite. Regardless, you’re eventually going to want to do both so why not get started now? Again, relax and take your time to get the chord so that you can play all the strings with a reasonable amount of comfort and clarity.

Now, believe it or not, comes the harder part, changing between chords. In order to do that, we’re going to change our philosophy a bit in regard to barre chords. So far, we’ve managed to make barre chords by getting the other fingers in place first. The main reason I had you do this was to get the feel of how the chord should be, to gain some confidence that you can make these chords and make them with a relative sense of ease.

To take this one step further, we now want to form the barre chords we’ve learned by laying down the index finger first. For the C#m, place your index finger in its barre position on the fourth fret and then get the other three fingers into the Am chord shape. On the F#m, you’ll want to get your index finger set on the second fret first, before adding the ring and pinky fingers to complete the chord.

You should find that the work you’ve done in setting up the barre chord is making it easier for you to get it in place in this “index finger first” fashion. You’ll also find that making the barre chord in this way, particularly if you’re going to be hitting the bass note before the rest of the chord, as in Example 3 (told you it pays to think ahead) will buy you an extra fraction of a heartbeat, which will help you to get all of the chord in place for the full chord strum on the second beat.

And now that you’ve got something to work on, let’s also make things a little easier for you by giving you a “barre-chord free” option. Many times when a song calls for a minor chord, the minor seventh can be used as a substitute. And, as luck would have it, there are relatively easy fingerings for C#m7 and F#m7, as you can see here:

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The C#m7 is especially interesting, as it’s pretty much a C#5, or a C# power chord if you will, but played across all five strings, from the A string down toward the floor. The open E string is what makes this chord minor, while the open B string provides the seventh.

This version of F#m7 might be familiar to those of you who’ve read the Nowhere Man lesson. Basically, it’s a “one finger” barre chord, but you can also use your thumb to get the bass note (F#) at the second fret of the low E (sixth) string.

Alright then, now that we have our chords and some ideas about strumming, let’s put together a verse:

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As we’ve been discussing, the hardest part about playing this is going to be making the chord changes from A to C#m to F#m. You want to practice this by starting out painfully slowly, at a tempo slightly slower than, say, tectonic plate movement, but slightly faster than the brains of most people’s when given the chance to not say incredibly silly or vapid things on the Internet. I’m certain you’re dead tired of my telling you that patience is key, that you’ll get faster with practice and clean repetition, so let’s just pretend that I’ve told you that, okay?

Help! is played at a fairly brisk pace on the original recording. I’ve heard many covers done in many different styles and tempos, so don’t worry about tearing along at speed until you’ve gotten comfortable making the changes between chords.

Introduction Riff, Chorus and Outro

I recall promising you a walking bass line…

The introduction and the choruses of Help! include two vital bits that we might think of as “signature riffs.” The first is actually a very short walking bass line, first from the B root note of Bm (second fret of the A string) to G (third fret of the low E (sixth) string) and then from G to the open low E. Before we get to that, though, let’s take a quick look at Bm:

The Bm is a carbon copy of the C#m barre chord, only our barre is on the second fret instead of at the fourth. And our other fingers are positioned accordingly, middle finger on the third fret of the G, pinky on the fourth fret of the D and ring finger on the fourth fret of the A string.

Because hitting this root note is vital to the signature riff, we don’t want to use any of our beginners’ substitutes for Bm, such as XX0432 or XX4432, because neither gives us that root note (again, second fret of the A string) to work off of. So many people might want to use the Bm7 shown in this example. But give the Bm barre chord your full attention, okay, and only use this substitution if your fingers are so sore they can’t barre anymore!

And since that’s taken care of, let’s look at the descending bass line used in the introduction:

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You’ll note that I’ve simplified the rhythm a touch in order to concentrate on getting the timing of the bass notes clean and right on the first and third beats of the second measure of both the Bm and the G chords. The very cool thing you may discover about playing a full Bm chord is that you only have to raise your index finger off the barre to get the open A string. Be careful not to strum all the way down to the open high E (first) string and you should be okay.

The walk from G to Em, via the F# note at the second fret of the low E (sixth) string, is something we’ve done in numerous lessons by now, so hopefully it won’t take you too long to get it back up to speed.

After two measures of E7 (please note that I’m using an open E7 chord here – 020100 – and that many transcriptions use a full open position E – 022100 – either choice is fine), we come to the much fancier signature riff, which is this:

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I call this an “A9″ riff because, in essence, we’re playing the open G and open B strings on top of an A chord. This is one of those instances where guitar players might want each of the chords spelled out, but it makes absolutely no sense to do so. The first notes on the A and D strings, respectively, are E (seventh fret of the A) and G (fifth fret of the D). That’s part of an A7 chord and many transcriptions will note that an A7 chord is played underneath this riff. But the droning of the B string definitely makes it an A9.

What you want to do is to move up the neck from your E7 chord, placing your index finger on the fifth fret of the D string and your ring finger on the seventh fret of the A string. Play an arpeggio, picking the A, D, G and B strings in order and then shift your fingers down one fret (ring finger on the sixth fret of the A and index on the fourth fret of the D). Play the resulting arpeggio again and slide your fingers down one fret once more. You’ll keep this up until you get to the fourth and second frets.

Like the barre chords, this is going to take some practice. It’s important to keep the rhythm of these eighth notes smooth and even (and not play them like I do sometimes in the final MP3!) and that will take some effort on your part. Plus, you want to practice getting to this riff from the E7 and then “landing” yourself back on the A chord that starts the first verse.

The reason all this is important is because you’re going to run into both the descending bass line and the “A9 riff” in each chorus:

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As you can see (and hear), the chorus is pretty much a “drawn out” version of the introduction. Instead of two measures of Bm, G and E7, there are four measures of each, with the appropriate walking bass line taking place in the fourth measure of the Bm and G chords. Shouldn’t be a problem at all.

It’s important to notice that there are also two measures of A immediately following the “A9 riff.” These start on the word “me” in the final “help me” of the chorus. The outro is essential a small change to these last two measures of A in the chorus, plus a bit of an addition. If we look at the last chorus, starting with the “A9 riff,” we see:

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You can see that we’ve got the “A9 riff” going and leading into an A chord for one measure instead of two. This measure is followed by a measure of F#m. And this particular measure is one place where you might find the substitution of F#m7 to be very helpful, because of what’s going to happen next.

Actually what happens here, in this arrangement of Help! is different than the original recording. In the penultimate measure, I opt to use a different voicing of the A chord, one (sneakily enough) that also uses the “single finger barre” that we can use to play the F#m7. Using the index finger to cover the four highest strings, I add my pinky to the fifth fret of the high E (sixth) string. This voicing of A is used quite frequently in classical music, as well as being a favorite voicing of Pete Townsend’s (you can hear it, for example, in The Seeker as well as in the Who classic, Won’t Get Fooled Again). I strum from the A string down, using this voicing, then pull off the index finger to get the F# note at the second fret and then strum once more, replacing my pinky on the fifth fret of the B string to get the E note. Here it’s important to stop the strum at the B string, otherwise I’d get the F# note again and I want to save that for the very last chord, A6.

Those of you with quick eyes and minds will notice that the A6 has the same fingering as the F#m7, except that A is now the root note. We could, if we choose to do so, argue that they are the same chord, after all they have the same notes. And we could argue that the A6 is simply an inversion of the F#m7. Or we could simply roll our eyes and get on with playing the whole song:

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I hope that you’ll truly forgive the big breakdown in the playing at the end of this last MP3. I could blame it on the writing and recording this under the influence of a lot of allergies and congestion and sore throat. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to redo it very, very soon.

And I also hope you’ve had fun with this lesson and are ready and willing to get going on playing songs with barre chords. They can definitely add a different voicing to a chord and also give a lot of “oomph” to your playing and the sooner you get comfortable using them, the sooner you’ll be using them without thinking about it.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Liner Notes

David Gilmour’s distinctive guitar style is often regarded as the most familiar aspect of the Pink Floyd sound. It’s instantly recognizable for its economy and tone and his gift of melodic phrasing is still influencing guitarists all over the world.

We have several lessons on the music of David Gilmour and Pink Floyd.

Comfortably Numb

Wish You Were Here

Wish You Were Here – Intro Solo

Money (for Bass Guitar)

For more check out our Pink Floyd artist page.

For more on this song visit Fretbase.

I had a conversation just last week with Guitar Noise Moderator-in-Chief (and all around terrific person) Nick Torres and we got to discussing what we call the “slap yourself on the forehead” moments – those times when you suddenly get something and can’t believe (a) how easy it is and (b) that you never got it before.

Two big “slap yourself on the forehead” moments for me were when I realized how many chords could be formed by sliding the shapes of open position chords I already knew up along the fingerboard of the guitar and when I discovered that fingerpicking could be relatively easy and painless to deal with. More important, that one could often simplify a fingerpicking pattern and still retain enough of the flavor of a song that other people would recognize it. Let’s see if we can’t help you feel the same way.

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

To help us with our lesson today, we’ll be using the Pink Floyd song Brain Damage, the penultimate number from their album, The Dark Side of the Moon. And, as an added bonus, we’ll toss in the last song, Eclipse, as well. So let’s get going…

First thing we notice when we look at chord charts for Brain Damage is that we know most of the chords. Don’t take my word for it; check it out yourself:

Nothing here that’s too much trouble. A few slash chords, but we’ll deal with those in a moment. When listening to the original recording, it sounds like two guitars are playing the same part, a picking pattern like this:

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This, just by itself, is not all that hard. You can play it with a pick or with your fingers or even both if you so desire. But performing this pattern while singing might be a bit of trouble for some (it was for me when I first learned it), so let’s simplify our pattern slightly. All that involves is removing one note and changing the timing just a little:

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If you listen to both examples, you do hear a difference. But is it a big enough difference to matter? Not unless you’re getting judged in a “Sound Exactly Like Pink Floyd” competition. Again, you can go with pick or fingers (or both) here. One thing that sounds very cool with finger style is to use a “pinch” for the first beat. Your thumb picks the D string while a finger (any finger, really) plucks upward on the high E (first) string. You’ll see (and hear) that in a moment.

And there’s nothing saying you can’t simplify matters even further. Let’s get rid of the last note in each measure and listen to it. Oh, and you’ll also get to hear that pinch on the first beat we just talked about:

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Of course, one can always go the other way and make things a little more complicated. But since we’re looking at this song from a beginner’s point of view, we’ll use either of these last two examples as our template for a picking pattern.

Regardless of which pattern (original, simplified or “even simpler simplified”) you choose to use, you want to take time and get comfortable with it. This basic pattern is used pretty much through all the “verse” parts of the song. The first three chords, D, G7/D and E/D, all employ the same exact pattern. That’s why the slash chords are used in the first place.

You may recall from Eleanor Rigby or other lessons here at Guitar Noise, that a slash chord is simply a chord using a different note as its bass (or lowest) note. When a guitar is in standard tuning, the lowest D note you can get is the open D (fourth) string. So the picking for the G7/D and the E/D both use only the four top strings of your guitar.

And it gets even better! G7 is one of those chords requiring, for most people anyway, a big stretch when you’re playing all six strings. But if you’re only playing it on the four high strings, it becomes a one-finger chord! All you’ll need is a finger on the first fret of the high E (first) string.

Better still, let’s tackle the E/D with a little bit of magic known as music theory. Since E is a full step from D and since every fret of the guitar is a half-step, then we can figure that any E note is two frets higher than any D note. That makes sense because we know that E can be found at the second fret of the D string as well as at the fifth fret of the B string (that’s how some of us tune our high E strings).

Well, it’s not that great of a leap to realize that what works for notes will also work for chords provided no open strings are involved in the chord. And since the open D note of the D chord is also going to be the bass note for our E/D chord, why don’t we just shove the D chord up two frets and use the same picking pattern we’ve been using? Well, try it out yourself and see:

The only other chord that’s left in the verse section is A7. There are many, many ways of playing this, but using this particular voicing of A7 works nicely because you get the G note on the high E string:

Most people find the easiest way to play this is to lay your index finger in a “mini-barre” across four strings at the second fret and then use one of your other fingers to get that G note at the third fret of the first string. You might also see that, since we’re using the same picking pattern from our other chords (except for the use of the open A string as our bass note on the first beat), that you can just barre three strings. But it’s a good thing to get across all four so that, should you happen to play the wrong string, it will still sound fine because all the notes are part of the A7 chord.

We can also get a little fancy here, adding a more interesting, not to mention melodic, line to the A7 as well as switching from D to Dadd9 (which some texts will call “Dsus2″) at the very end of the verse, like this:

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This isn’t anywhere near as complicated as you might think on hearing it for the first time.

The second verse is pretty much a repeat of the first verse, but at the very end we want to from D to D7. We can do this very easily while using the “optional” ending we saw in Example 4:

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But another option is to use these last measures of D and D7 in the second verse as a chance to switch from picking to strumming. In the chorus sections on the original recording, the guitar mostly plays arpeggios and the occasional broken chord, but there’s also a whole band making a lot of sound in the background. Since we’re working on a single-guitar arrangement, it’s not a bad idea to give the chorus section a different feel, and since the overall effect we’re looking for is “more” – more intense, more involved (louder, in other words) – changing from picking to strumming will help create the feel we’re looking for.

It doesn’t even have to involve that much strumming. Here’s an idea to help us switch over:

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In this particular pattern, we’re using a measure of D played in two half notes. Nice lazy downstrokes. We follow that up with a simple arpeggio that starts with playing a regular old D chord, but also adding our pinky to the third fret of the high E (first string) and then performing a pull-off to get the F# note at the second fret of that string. We then play the B string, where our ring finger is already on the third fret and finally remove our middle finger from the high E (first) string to get the open E string to sound during the last three notes of the measure. This is a typical flourish one might play with a D chord and, with a little practice, will probably be something you find yourself doing without conscious thought before too long.

Even though we’re strumming the chords of the chorus, we probably still want a lot of space in our strumming pattern. How about we try something like this:

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We’ll keep this up until the very end of the chorus, ending with a single strum of G on the word “moon.” And, to ease us back into doing some more picking, we’ll stay with single strums of the Bm7, Em7 and A7 chords, like this:

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And that’s pretty much all there is to Brain Damage. After the first chorus, you go begin the third verse, which starts out exactly like the two earlier verses. But there’s a slight “hiccup,” if you will in the chord progression. Up through the line “…you rearrange me ‘til I’m sane…” everything stays the same and you find yourself going through two measures of D here. But in the next line (“…you lock the door…”) you want to go back to the D to E/D to A7 part of the verse once again before finishing with D and D7, and that takes you back to the final chorus.

Eclipse

After this last playing of the chorus, Brain Damage closes with an instrumental run through the third verse, complete with the two passes of the D to E/A to A7 progression, ending with two measures of D as we played in Example 4.

And this leads us directly to Eclipse. The first important thing to know about this song is that it’s in 3 / 4 time, as opposed to the 4 / 4 timing of Brain Damage. So right away you have to be acutely aware that when you begin the introduction that you want to pay attention to your counting. It’s not that hard of a switch if you’re ready for it.

At its heart, Eclipse is simply four chords repeated over and over again. Or five or six chords, depending on how you choose to look at it. The many layers of guitar parts are essentially arpeggios playing over each other, with a bit of a more traditional “lead” part coming in at the third sung stanza.

If you listen closely to the original recording, you’ll also hear that none of the guitar parts are played identically throughout. There are little changes in the strings played or in the order of notes on the arpeggios – even to the point where extra notes and occasional double stops can be heard. So what’s a person to do?

The answer to that is simple – play around and experiment. See what you like and what you don’t like. Here’s a template that you can use to get you started:

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There are all sorts of possibilities open to you. One of my reasons for using this one is that I’m actually only playing four of the six chords listed. If you’ll look carefully, the notes I’m playing for the Bbmaj7 can use the same fingering as the Bbmaj7(b5). Likewise, on the A I can use the fingering for A7 to play this particular arpeggio. In fact, on the original recording it often uses only the A7 chord for both measures.

You should mess around with this progression and find out what you like and what works for your hands. There is no one right way to play it, as obvious in the original recording. I know that this is something I tend to harp on in all our lessons, but in this age of cut-and-paste digital performance, it never can be said enough.

This progression of chords runs through to the end of the song, where you go directly from the Bbmaj7(b5) to a resounding D chord for a finale. So here’s our complete cheat sheet for Eclipse:

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I hope that you’ve had fun with this lesson and maybe have had a few of those “slap yourself on the forehead” moments! Whether you’ve been learning the guitar for a few weeks, months or most of your life, there’s nothing like the feeling when you start a song and someone recognizes what you’re playing. It’s a feeling that certainly makes you want to go out and learn some more! Not to mention play some more.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Liner Notes

The Rolling Stones formed in London in 1962 with singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards forming one of rock music’s most enduring songwriting partnerships.

Guitar Noise has several easy guitar lessons for classic Rolling Stones songs.

Happy

Play With Fire

For more check out our artist page for The Rolling Stones

For more on this song visit Fretbase.

Let’s wrap up, for the moment at least, our look at walking bass lines with the classic Rolling Stones’ song, As Tears Go By. Marianne Faithfull’s cover of this song, which is how many people came to know it in the first place, was recorded and released before the Stones recorded their own version, and amazingly (not counting their playing it on Ed Sullivan), wasn’t played on a Rolling Stones tour until November 2005.

Be that as it may, let’s take a quick moment to note two things concerning our lesson: First, when I say “wrap up,” I’m lying. Not to mention making a bad, if late, joke concerning Christmas presents. It’s kind of silly to say that we ever wrap up anything in these lessons, because one of the purposes behind them is to give you ideas and tools that you can use no matter what song you’re playing. We’ll be seeing lots of walking bass lies in the future. I’m just hoping I don’t have to explain them from scratch.

The second thing is that we’ll also use this lesson to give us a bit of an introduction into the idea of cross picking. But more on that in a moment…

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

In terms of structure, As Tears Go By is made up of three verses, four if you count an instrumental verse between the second and third verses. Each verse contains four lines and the first two lines have the same chord progression. Have a look:

As you can see here, there’s nothing you can’t handle. So if you’d like, pick a strumming pattern and go. Here’s one that will work nicely:

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This is, of course, one of countless patterns that will work for this song. I’ve chosen this particular strumming pattern in order to help us make incorporating a walking bass line a little easier. Also, being sneaky, having both the pattern and the walking bass line will make our look at cross picking a little easier as well.

I should also mention here that, while I’m fairly certain these are the right chords; I’ve heard all sorts of chord substitutions in the numerous arrangements of this song that I’ve heard over the years. Some folks use A7 instead of A. Some like the sound of Am or Am7 instead of A. And, as you’ll see towards the end of the lesson, there’s all sorts of suspended chords and fills and ornamentation you can add when you’re playing.

So let’s use this strumming pattern and chord progression as a template and get going with a walking bass line. At this point, I hope, you’ll see it as nothing more than “connecting the dots” between the root notes of the chords:

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After going through the lessons on You Are My Sunshine and Connecting the Dots, Part 3, this sort of thing will hopefully be old hat to some of you by now. The only somewhat tricky part involves using the open low E (sixth) string for the E and F# notes when you change from the D to the G chords. A lot of people find it easy to hook one’s thumb over the top of the neck to get that F#, but since you’re not playing any chord at that point, just using the index or middle finger should work fine.

If you are comfortable with what we’re doing to this point, that’s cool because that allows you to start trying some other variations. For example, you could stagger the strumming and the bass line on the section where the chords change from G to Em:

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Again, you can use either your thumb or a finger to get the F# note in the bass. Not worrying about hitting the B note (second fret of the A string) of a “normal” G chord does have some advantages!

While this first variation may not seem like that big of a change, it makes a big difference to the listener, if for no other reason that you’ve broken up the strumming / rhythm pattern that you’ve been using for the first two and a half lines of the verse. Little subtleties such as this are how you keep from being robotic, playing the same strumming or rhythm pattern over and over and over again.

The second variation carries the “new” rhythm pattern (which, as you’ve already figured out, is the same rhythm that we used for the original strumming template.

You can likewise tinker around all throughout the song. Here are some suggestions for the very last line, where you change from D to D7:

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The first variation uses notes of the D chord (D and A, of the open D and A strings respectively, and F# at the second fret of the low E string) before going back to the open E and F# to walk back up to G. Here you might definitely find using your thumb an advantage in fretting your bass note of F#.

Things get a little more complicated with the second variation even though, to the ears at least, it’s a simple descending walking bass line. Simple to the ears, but you’ll want to take some time sussing out the fingering. Personally, I find myself using my pinky to get the C note (third fret of the A string) in the bass and then changing my whole fingering around – index finger on the B (second fret of the A string) in the bass while my middle, ring and pinky reform the D chord in the high strings. Some people like forming a “mini-barre” chord, using their index finger to cover the second fret of the high three strings and getting the D at the third fret of the B string with either the ring finger or pinky. This frees up the middle finger for the bass notes. Take you time with this variation and be prepared to do some practicing!

The third variation sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is. One starts out with the normal D chord and then adds a pinky to the third fret of the high E (first) string to get the G note (technically turning the whole thing into Dsus4), then removes it to get the second fret again and then opens up the first string entirely for the E note. While we could spend ages debating that we’ve created a Dsus2, it’s all merely ornamentation.

The second measure of this variation can all be done with pull-offs if you wish. Sounds very cool, in fact!

In and of itself, there’s enough here to mess around with without going any further. But I’d like to take one last step (or two) forward, if for no other reason than to give you more to think about. What we’re going to try to do is to pick individual strings in place of the strumming of chords. Some people call this flat picking, some call it cross picking and I’m not here to debate terminology. To me, it’s just part of playing. Let’s start with the G chord and work through the first line:

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Here, regardless of the chord, we’re starting with the root note on a downstroke and then hitting the high E (first) string with an upstroke, then a downstroke on the D string and finally an upstroke on the B string. You’ll find this a lot easier using alternate picking and you may also simply find playing chords in this manner a good exercise to help you get better at alternate picking. Even if you miss the string you want, you’ll hit another note in the chord as long as you keep the chord in place with your fingers.

And frankly, no one’s going to know if you make a mistake unless you start swearing! I can’t stress enough here that this is, again, one of many patterns that you can play. And I also want you to listen to something – in the MP3, I play the first line exactly as written out and then go and then just play the rest of the verse without worrying about the pattern. To my ears, things sound a lot better when I’m not worried about it. Why? Because then I’m playing and not being a tape recorder is certainly part of it. But as I just mentioned, as long as I keep my chord shapes, there’s not going to be a bad note. Most songs don’t require you to use a single pattern throughout. Doing so, in fact, makes you sound like you’re just a looping device. More importantly, it tires you out as much as it does your listener.

As a guitarist, you’re not going to be playing in front of people and muttering under your breath “…root note, high E string, D string, B string, root note…” Trust me, you don’t want to be! Right now you merely want to be thinking “bass, high, middle, high-ish” and getting yourself comfortable with playing in this manner. Before long, you’ll be able to add in bass notes as well:

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You’ll have to forgive me for only giving you the first two lines as a start. You’re actually getting off better than my private students, who have to come back to me in a week’s time with whatever they’ve dreamed up as an accompaniment for this song. A lot of times, and this is when I know they’ve got the point, they’ll play it slightly differently in each verse and not be totally conscious of what they’re doing. You might end up with something like this:

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Or something totally different. But that’s the whole idea.

As always, I hope that you’ve had fun with this lesson and have learned a few things about walking bass lines in the past few months. In the near future, we’ll be looking at how to combine strumming with picking and will, hopefully, be sounding a lot more like musicians and less like people who panic without patterns!

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Also in this Series

• Connecting The Dots – Part 1
• Connecting The Dots – Part 2
• Connecting The Dots – Part 3

One problem that we face, though, is that we often practice these two skills separately, and that makes it a little hard to get things together at first. Eleanor Rigby was a good start at getting to work at the two techniques together, and I’d like to continue a bit on that aspect of your playing. So in this lesson, we’ll take a pattern we’ve already learned (in the Easy Songs for Beginners Lesson on Margaritaville), add some simple chords we already know (E, E7, A, A7, D and B7), and ratchet our strumming and chord changing skills up a notch or two. And to make this a little more interesting (not to mention fun), let’s learn two new songs instead of the usual one we do in each lesson. We’ll dig a bit into the “country” catalogue and pull out two standards – Folsom Prison Blues, by Johnny Cash and the Hank Williams’ classic, Your Cheatin’ Heart. And, by the bye, if you ever want a real treat, you should get to hear two of the Guitar Noise Forum moderators perform these songs. Wes Inman does a terrific turn on Folsom Prison Blues while Nick Torres’ rendition of Your Cheatin’ Heart is second to none.

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

If you’re keeping track of these things, this lesson fits nicely after the aforementioned piece on Margaritaville, and if you haven’t already read that one, then you might want to take a moment to do so. In essence, people tend to start strumming with simple downstrokes. Then the occasional upstroke or two is added. Then we might do what we call a “bass/strum” pattern, where the root note of the chord is played and then followed by the whole chord. And then beginners evolve from there to the alternating bass line. We’ll be using the same basic strumming pattern from the Margaritaville lesson, complete with alternating bass line, in this lesson, so being up to speed on what we’re talking about will certainly help you to get the nuances of these two songs a bit quicker.

Folsom Prison Blues

Let’s start out with Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues. We’re going to play this song in the key of E, so we’ll need the following chords:

The original recording of this song is in F, so if you want to play along with it, you should place a capo on the first fret. I’m playing in E on the MP3 files here, so don’t worry about a capo if you just want to play along with the MP3 files. And do try to remember to right click on the files so that you can use the “Save Target As…” function to save them directly to your computer. Doing this means you don’t have to download the sound files more than once, which will help us save a bit of bandwidth.

In terms of structure, Folsom Prison Blues follows a variation of the basic twelve bar blues format (as one might suspect from the title). If you’d like to learn more about the twelve bar blues structure, check out the lesson Before You Accuse Me and then hurry back. There are numerous ways to fool around with the basic chords of this song, but for the sake of simplicity as well for the overall structure of the lesson, I’ve gone with the following:

Please note that I placed a chord marking for every measure (every four beats), which will hopefully make things a little easier for everyone. There should be four measures per line of lyrics. I’ve also made a few changes or substitutions, if you will. Many TABs or transcriptions for this song will use a regular A instead of the A7, but I really think the A7 adds a lot to the sound, making things a little more blues-y. Also, I tend to come in earlier with the E7 than others might. Some folks don’t even use the E7 at all. These are all things that you can experiment with. As always, you should feel free to ultimately come up with your own arrangement of this song.

And now that we have our chords, let’s use our strumming pattern from Margaritiville to get us started. Here are the basic patterns, using root notes only, for the E, A7 and B7 chords. Obviously, you can use the E pattern for E7 as well:

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Remember that you don’t want to hit all the strings when strumming the chords. Just the top three or four will do, since the bass note will resonate over the entire thing. And on the upstroke especially, you just want to hit the top two or three strings, even though the notation and TAB shows all four. Basically, when you make the upstroke, you’re bringing the pick back a little, almost in a cocking motion, to get it set for the next single hit of the bass string. This takes a little getting used to, but you will be surprised at how quickly it comes with a little concentrated practice on your part.

You can, of course, play the whole song using just this pattern. You could also skip the bass notes entirely and simply strum the chords for the whole song as well. That will sound fine. But give the pattern a try. We’ll be taking things a step or two further in a moment, but first I’d like to address the subject of changing chords.

In our lesson on Eleanor Rigby we discuss making chord changes in a timely fashion by starting our switching a little earlier than necessary and then working the changes up to speed through practice and repetition. Here on Folsom Prison Blues, I’d like you to use the strumming pattern itself to give you the chance to make timely chord changes. You’ll notice that we have five different chord changes in this song: E to E7, E7 to A, A to E, E to B7 and B7 back to E. With the exception of the B7 chord, we start each of our strumming patterns with a hit of an open string for our bass note. Here, for example, is the switch from E to E7:

The idea is to make the switch from E to E7 when you strike that open E string at the start of the second measure (where the “*” is). Since the change from E to E7 merely involves lifting your ring finger off the D string, doing this at speed, even a slow tempo, should pose little to no problems for most of you, so let’s move on the E7 to A and A to E switches:

Because you’ve probably done a lot of switching between E and A (and back again), this change should become easy after a few tries. And even if you’ve never tried changing from E or E7 to A before, your fingers should catch on in a relatively short while. Try to remember to start slowly, keeping the tempo even. Don’t pick up speed until you’re pretty confident you can make the change cleanly at a slow pace.

Okay, one more chord change to deal with:

At first glance, the E to B7 change might seem a bit involved, but if you think about it for a moment, you realize that when you play the E chord your middle finger is right there on the second fret of the A string – exactly where you need it to be to play the B root notes of the B7 chord. So keep that finger in place, and as you strike that note at the start of the B7 measure should be when you shift your fingers over from E to the rest of the B7 chord. It’s a pretty simply switch. Your index finger moves from the first fret of the G string to the first fret of the D while your ring finger shunts from the second fret of the D string to the second fret of the G string. Add your pinkie to the second fret of the high B string and you’re good to go.

Notice that, with this particular change, your pinkie should be the last thing you worry about. Even if you don’t get it there on time, the chord will sound fine with an open high E string. The most important thing is to get the index and ring fingers to make their shift in the time it takes you to hit the B note that your middle finger hangs onto.

Now that you’ve got a good handle on your chord changes, let’s spice up the strumming pattern with a good ol’ country alternating bass line. Here are the patterns for our chords, and remember you can use the same pattern for both E and E7:

The only tricky part here is the B7 chord. Some people actually cover both the second fret of the A and low E strings with their middle fingers, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of practice to get comfortable making your finger dance from string to string.

When you do get the hang of the alternating bass strum, then go back over your five chord changes, incorporating this new strumming pattern into the mix. And then work the whole song up to speed and voila! You’ve got it!

But it doesn’t have to stop there because of the incredible number of variations you can do. On the alternating bass patterns, you can use the E note at the second fret of the D string during your E, E7 and A chords. You can also bring hammer-ons into your playing. Here are a few of the many variations you can try:

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As you can hear, we’ve created a lot of cool musical touches simply by using techniques and patterns you already know. I particularly like the last example with the B7 chord. Giving that F# at the second fret of the low E string a little tug provides a nice blues-y feel, especially when you use it right before switching to the E chord.

And speaking of which, the signature that opens Folsom Prison Blues comes straight from using that B7 chord:

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This is a great example of how a guitar riff is created right from a chord. And it’s not only easy to play, it’s a lot of fun. So let’s try doing the Intro followed by a whole verse before moving on to our second song.

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Your Cheatin’ Heart

As you’ve hopefully learned, once you know a pattern, such as the one we used in Margaritaville, you can adapt it to other songs with relative ease. Sometimes, though, you’ve got to make some adjustments for one reason or another.

For example, if you were to play this alternating bass strum pattern as an accompaniment for Hank Williams’ Your Cheatin’ Heart, you might feel that, on account of this song’s slower pace, the pattern doesn’t fill up enough space. Try it out and see. Here are the chords (more on that in a moment), once again written out as one chord change for every measure (four beats):

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This is certainly okay to play and to listen to, but it leaves me thinking that these must some way to pick it up a little. The strumming makes the song seems a little lifeless and that’s not a good way to treat a great song.

So let’s pick it up a little. In this case, it will be a simple matter of adding an extra eighth note to our alternating bass strumming pattern. This is a fairly time-honored rhythm method on the guitar, used in songs across all genres. You start out exactly like the alternating bass strum, hitting the root note of the chord on the first beat. But you want to play an eighth note instead of the usual quarter note and then follow that eighth note up with a second eighth note played on one of the middle strings of the guitar, usually the D or G strings, like this:

You will probably find it makes your strumming a lot smoother if you play the first note (the root) as a downstroke and then use an upstroke on the second note. After practicing it on A and A7, as we’ve done in this example, try it out on D, E, E7 and B7.

This is a great way to get started on learning some alternate picking and crosspicking skills as well as to develop more dexterity and confidence in your picking skills in general. It really doesn’t matter which string you hit as your second note. As long as you’ve got the whole chords formed with your fretting hand, you can’t play a “bad” note. Try it out and see for yourself!

After you get comfortable with this new picking pattern, you want to take the same steps we used in Folsom Prison Blues – namely try out playing some chord changes and then see if you can add an alternating bass pattern to this new one:

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Hopefully you heard me mention in the last MP3 that I’m using swing eighths to play this particular pattern. Swing eighths give us more of a blues shuffle feeling and you can read more about them in the Roll Over Beethoven lesson. It’s a little difference, but it does make all the world of change in the feel of the song. Give the examples another listen and play them both ways yourself. If you prefer the sound of straight eighths, then by all means, play it that way.

Again, try these ideas out on one or two chords first. Then work your way through all the chords you’ll need for Your Cheatin’ Heart. Or all the chords you know, for that matter. Finally, put your pattern to the test by playing through a whole verse.

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At the risk of repeating myself, don’t hesitate to experiment and add some new touches, such as hammer-ons and pull-offs or different alternating notes, to your arrangement. Have fun with it!

Now, a quick word on the chords: For the purpose of continuity, not to mention to make this a little easier for everyone, I transposed Your Cheatin’ Heart into the key of A. This way you get to practice making the same chord changes while learning the new strumming pattern. That seems to make sense. To me, anyway!

The original recording of the song is in the key of C, so if you want to play along with that, put a capo on the third fret and use these chords. Otherwise, you’ll want to transpose it back to the original key! The MP3 is in A, so you can play along with these sound files without a capo.

I hope you enjoyed this lesson and that you use the strumming patterns here (as well as the chord changing tips) with other songs you’re learning. The idea is to use these lessons here at Guitar Noise as templates for all your music, not just to learn one single song.

Or two…

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forum page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

But what, exactly, is “simple?” Depending upon your skill level, something that someone else says is simple can seem well beyond your abilities. Present abilities, you should say. As you evolve as a guitarist, improving and adding new skills and techniques and knowledge to your playing, your concept of “simple” will also evolve.

This is one reason why I spend so much time stressing that you don’t worry about playing “by the recording.” If you’re a beginner, there’s little point in comparing your abilities to those of someone who’s been playing professionally longer than you’ve been alive. Unless, of course, you simply like being frustrated. Personally, I don’t think much good can come of it.

But a lot of good can come from the enjoyment you get in revisiting old songs and bringing something new to them. Arrangements, like your abilities, also constantly evolve. Some people can play the same song over and over again and never be bored because they actually play it differently each time.

So to demonstrate this point, let’s take a simple song, make a simple arrangement of it and then let it evolve a little bit. I guess that means hauling out our friendly disclaimer:

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

For this lesson, we’ll be using Friend Of The Devil, a song originally by the Grateful Dead and covered by so many artists (Lyle Lovett and Counting Crows come immediately to mind) that it’s hard to list. Technically, it only uses four chords: G, C, D and Am, which you hopefully feel comfortable enough with by now.

If you take a look at a very simple chord sheet for this song, you’ll probably find something like the following:

As I mentioned, four chords. All we need do is come up with a strumming pattern we like (and can easily play) (or learn) and we’re set. Here is one that should work well with this song. Remember that the “D” stands for “downstroke” and the “U” denotes an “uspstroke:”

This particular pattern is actually based on the rhythm guitar of the recorded song. With very little practice, you should find it comes easily to your strumming hand. Start with the “full chord” version and then, when you feel you’re ready, give the “bass / strum” example (also known, believe it or not, as the “boom-chuck” approach) a try. You’re now able to play this song and add it to your repertoire. End of lesson…

Okay, you know me better than that! After all, at this stage in your guitar playing life, you should be able to get to this point on your own. If we’re all agreed that, so far, we think this is simple enough to play, shall we move on?

Can you play a G major scale? Whoa! You’re probably wondering how we jumped to this topic! Fair warning, if you’re someone who does his or her damnedest to stay away from “traditional” things like scales, theory, knowing that the note on the third fret of the A string is actually called “C” and not “just play this,” then I’m going to try to teach you something. Feel free to just go on and “read the pictures” if you will, but everything will be easily explained in the text. So please give it a read at some point if you’re having any troubles.

Back to the matter at hand – Since Friend Of The Devil is in the key of G, it doesn’t hurt to be aware of the G major scale, which is conveniently written out below:

You’ll notice that I’ve placed the G note written on the second line up from the bottom of the staff at two different places on your guitar. You can play it as the open G string and you can also find this note located at the fifth fret of the D string. You already know this, of course, from manually tuning your guitar. If not, then consider it something to keep somewhere in your head among the somewhat important bits of information already there, such as the birthdays of your friends and family.

If you listen to the G major scale and then listen to a recording of the song, you’ll hear that the “signature guitar riff” is nothing more than a descending G Major scale:

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Well, playing just that descending scale seems simple enough. But something you should know is that some folks will decide that using this descending G Major scale means that you should also go and change the chord names. This will involve using slash chords and will make the “simple” chord sheet look a little more like these examples:

What does that mean for us simple folks? Not really a lot. We’re going to just think about the descending scale as “passing tones” and just go about our business of adding some chords to the notes of the descending scale. I’ve kept the basic G and C chords of the verses and turned them into slash chords simply so that you can keep track of what note of the scale you’re on:

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Again, with a very little bit of concentrated effort, this will be something that you should be able to accomplish in relatively little time. If you use this pattern for the verses and go back to the “bass / strum” pattern for the choruses and bridge, you’ve now got a more complicated arrangement that is still simple for you to play.

You might have noted in these last examples that I start with the G at the fifth fret of the D string instead of the open G string. You can certainly use either, but when we get into the following verse patterns, you should see (and hear) the advantages. Before we do that, though, this would be a good place to bring up that you can play the verses just like this, and then add the “boom-chuck” approach for the choruses and bridge and have a perfectly good arrangement for this song.

And, quick as you please, you now have two possible arrangements before going any further. And, for some of you, either of these two arrangements is a great place to start. The whole point of this lesson is to show you how you can “grow” an arrangement and to do that, you’ve got to start with what you know and then add on to it as you learn more, because, at some point, you’re going to be learning more and looking for more.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’ve managed to get a handle on playing simple arpeggios, such as those in the lesson on House of the Rising Sun. Having that under your belt, you might want to take a stab at applying your arpeggio playing to an arrangement, much like the first section of the following example:

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You can hear we’ve given the song a very different character. In order to further demonstrate the simple, yet drastic differences you can make in an arrangement, I played the first “option for verse pattern” with just my fingers and then again using a pick. Again, there’s a very distinct feeling with each of these approaches. The first time out sounds very folkish while the second smacks of bluegrass. The notes played are exactly the same, it’s just a matter of the method you use to bring those notes to your listener.

Now let’s say that you’ve become a little more adept at picking your arpeggios. Then you might try the second section of this last example, called (appropriately enough) “another option for verse.” This involves a little more crosspicking than the first section, but with some concentrated effort, shouldn’t be beyond your capabilities. Notice the slight variation in the bass line in the final measure, caused by hammering-on from the open A string to the B note at the second fret. This is not from the original recording, but because it sounds pretty cool so I’ve added it to the mix. Also, adding that full G chord at the end kind of punctuates the end of the phrase, creating some interesting dynamics by giving the song a little more punch.

So now you have three or four ways of playing the verses. That’s not too bad of a start. Shall we take a look at the chorus? Because the verse is so busy with its descending bass line, a return to something simple would be a good first approach to the chorus:

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Rather than using a straight “bass / strum” or “boom-chuck” accompaniment, this “basic chorus” employs an alternating bass line, much like that in the Margaritaville lesson here at Guitar Noise. Please note that the rhythm is slightly broken up every other measure, which tosses in an extra bass note on the fourth beat instead of a replay of the chord. Generally speaking, the third and/or fourth beats of a measure before a chord change are good places to throw in a fill or two and we’re playing a very simple two-note fill here.

Another thing to notice is how the last measure of D contains an ascending bass line – the final E (second fret of the D string) and F# (fourth fret) – which leads us back to the G note that starts the verse. This is called a “turnaround,” a phrase that you’re probably familiar with from playing the blues. A turnaround is a chord progression or riff that leads the listening back to the song’s beginning chord, which often (but not always) is the home or root chord of the key of the song. The bonus to you, as a player, is that this particular turnaround gets you right in position for the verse pattern.

This arrangement of the chorus is fairly straightforward and shouldn’t give you much more trouble than doing a straight strum of the chords or a typical “bass / strum.” And you know what I’m going to say next, that you can add to this arrangement according to your abilities. Let’s say that you’ve been working on your hammer-ons and pull-offs and want to incorporate them more into your playing. Starting with the basic chorus, we can add to it like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The pull-offs in the second measure and the hammer-ons in the fourth measure are, respectively, all based on the D and Am chords. So playing these doesn’t involve any extraneous finger movement. I told you I like simple things! Measures six through eight use small walking bass lines along with Am and C chord arpeggios before heading back to our alternating bass pattern D from the basic chorus pattern.

The final measure of this “embellished” chorus contains a different turnaround to get us back to our verse pattern. It’s the flashiest thing we’ve tried so far and, to be honest, is a little more than what I would consider teaching a pure beginner. But what’s learning without a challenge or two? These are just notes of the G major scale, centered around the open D major chord. In the MP3, I’m playing this very slowly and you can hear that I’m using alternating picking to play this. When I get to the final A note (second fret of the G string), I then shift my finger to the second fret of the D string (the E note) in order to slide up to the G note at the fifth fret and once again begin the verse pattern. This slide takes place very quickly. It’s almost like “Oops! I didn’t mean to hit that note! Here’s the note I want!”

Some people might find it easier to slide from the F natural (third fret of the D string) as shown in this example:

There’s not much of a difference between this two, but they do have very different sounds. So if you decide to use either of these variations of the chorus, take your time to hear which one you like and also experiment and see what fingering works well with you.

Because we’ve been so busy with the verses and choruses, I find the bridge a good place to lay back a little. You can, if you decide to do so, use the basic strumming patterns you learned at the beginning of this lesson. That will sound perfectly fine.

I’ve come up with this arrangement of the bridge, which is recorded painfully slowly on the accompanying MP3 file. You’ll hear it more at speed in the final MP3:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This is pretty much straight quarter note arpeggios up until the very end when it reverts back to the patterns we used in the embellished chorus section.

The song ends with a final verse and chorus and has one of those “unresolved” feelings because D is the last chord. Here’s an MP3, which contains a verse, chorus, bridge and then final verse and chorus. You’ll hear different ideas that we’ve touched upon in this lesson as well as some expansions on these ideas (other arpeggios and staggered rhythms) and also a few genuinely bad clunkers!

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I hope you had fun with this lesson and that you enjoy playing around with this song. I also hope that you understand that, as you grow as a guitarist, you should be able to go back to some of the songs you played as absolute beginner and bring something new to them. A lot of the differences that people perceive as “beginning” or “intermediate” guitarists are simply the ability to make a more interesting strum or to add a little embellishment here and there. Taking the things you’ve learned and applying them to what you already know is one of the best ways to jumpstart this process.

If you had fun with this lesson, I’d like to encourage you to take a look at Time After Time, our next Songs for Intermediates lesson, which should be up sometime before the middle of July. It will take a lot of the ideas we used here and expand on them. If you can handle the Bookends lesson on the Easy Songs for Beginners pages, you’ll find Time After Time, while a bit of a challenge, within your capabilities.

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Trouble was (and still is) that after writing three lessons with songs that only had two chords, it seemed smart to branch out and look at other things that beginners would need to know. After all, who plays only two-chord songs for years at a time? The idea was (and still is) to try to teach various aspects of music theory and guitar technique through the playing of songs that the majority of our readers might be familiar with.

I’m sure you’re ahead of me now (and that’s actually the point), and can already see that there are numerous problems with this approach. Since everyone learns at decidedly different paces, what might seem a beginner’s lesson to one might be a bit advanced for another. As a teacher, I prefer to challenge my students. After learning some basics, no one needs a teacher to strum a few chords. That’s why we have the Easy Song Database.

But we do need to fill in some gaps in our current slate of beginners’ song lessons. And today’s lesson might indeed be a little too basic for some of you. But I’m hoping, as always, to throw in enough extra ideas to make it worth everyone’s while.

So, onward, eh?

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Okay, if you’re still with me, here’s our lesson agenda: We’ll be using the Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby, as a lesson dealing with changing chords for beginners. It technically has only two chords (and notice the word “technically”), so that shouldn’t be too big of a problem. We’ll also look at the “choking” technique of strumming, something that you’ll want to get into, especially if you ever decide to play gypsy jazz style rhythm guitar. And we will throw in an introduction (or reintroduction, depending on which lessons you’ve already covered on your own) to “slash chords.”

If that’s not enough for you, there will be a “bonus section” dealing with a (very) short guitar fill that is a great exercise in alternate picking. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a pretty good deal from a song that lasts a little more than two minutes in its original recording. And we’ll be speaking of that soon enough…

Before we go on, there are two things I’d like to add. First, if you’re wondering just “where” this lesson falls into the current listing of lesson, I’d probably place it “fourth,” meaning that it would come after Horse With No Name, For What It’s Worth, and Feelin Alright and before Three Marlenas and Margaritaville. At least, that’s where it comes when I teach my adult group classes at the Berkshire Community College (they get Big Yellow Taxi instead of Feelin Alright but for very sinister reasons…)

Second, since I’m treating this as an “early beginners’” lesson, be prepared to get a lot of advice on things like changing chords and keeping timing. After all, those are two of the hardest parts of getting going on the guitar.

Okay, then! To play Eleanor Rigby, you’ll need to know two chords, Em and C:

We’re going to start with the C chord. While there are many ways of fingering the Em chord, most people play C with the index finger on the first fret of the B string, the middle finger sitting at the second fret of the D string and the ring finger placed on the third fret of the A string. Get you fingers set with the C chord and we’ll get ready to play the introduction.

I should also mention some good news as far as the strumming goes. The predominant instrumentation on Eleanor Rigby is the string section, which probably makes you wonder why we’re going to do the song on a single guitar! We’ll do our best to emulate the strings and, in this case, it means playing straight quarter notes and using only downstrokes for our strumming. Things can’t get too much easier!

The introduction is two measures (eight beats) of C followed by two measures of Em. Then all four measures are repeated. Let’s do this relatively slowly to start with:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

First things first – depending upon how much of a beginner you are (and how much you practice (or have practiced) changing from chord to chord), you probably had little to no problems going from C to Em. Getting back to C might have required a little more attention, right?

If that’s the case, don’t panic! And pay attention because this is probably the most important thing I could ever teach you. Changing chords will come with practice, patience and persistence. Again, depending on how much of a beginner you are, you have to realize that you have spent more of your life not playing guitar. So don’t expect your hands to immediately do things they have to learn. That’s the “patience” part…

But when you are practicing a song that you are intending to play, it’s important to practice timing. For a beginner (and unfortunately a lot of others), this is what usually happens when practicing a song:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Sound at all familiar? I’d like to introduce you to the idea of making your timing more important than your chord changing. Why? As I’ve pointed out (and as anyone who plays guitar will tell you), you will get faster with your chord changes as you practice them. But if you are continually practicing bad timing, then you will indeed get better at keeping time badly.

A song such as Eleanor Rigby gives us an ideal opportunity to practice both keeping time and changing chords. In the introduction you have eight beats of each chord, followed by eight more beats of each chord. If you had no problem switching from C to Em, you probably changed right before the ninth beat, like this:

But coming back from Em to C, you want to give yourself a little extra time to get your fingers set in their place. Let’s say that you know you need at least three beats to do it. So you’re going to want to play the second part of it like this:

The object here is to make the chord change in time with the tempo. Tempo, when playing a song, is usually pretty steady, so if you can’t make the change within a beat’s time, you’re going to want to get ready for your chord change earlier.

Practicing like this helps you in a lot of ways. First, you’re going to be looking for more efficient ways to change chords. If you normally finger the Em chord with your middle finger on the second fret of the D string and your index finger on the second fret of the A string, then you can keep your middle finger in place when changing from Em to C. That’s one less thing to worry about. Those of you who use your ring finger on the D string and your middle finger on the A will need to be a little quicker, and with a little practice you’ll find yourselves making the switch without thinking twice about it.

As you get better at changing chords, you’ll need less time to switch between them. Before you know it, you’ll start your switch on the seventh beat, then on the eighth. And finally you’ll be able to make the switch between the eighth and ninth beat, which is exactly where you want it in this song.

The second thing that concern us with the strumming in Eleanor Rigby is getting a crisp, clipped sound like pizzicato strings. This will involve doing a sort of combination of palm muting and the percussive stroke we covered back in For What It’s Worth. Have a listen:

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If there’s any “trick” to this, it’s in keeping your hand close to the strings and making a short, compact stroke with the pick. Because of our experiences watching bands on stage, or worse in music videos, beginners often have a strong misconception as to how much movement is involved in picking and strumming. I like to joke with my students about guitarists having a “lazy” mentality, but in many cases if you remember that you want to do as little work as possible, you’re actually going to be better off! Strumming is done with the wrist, actually a combination of the wrist and forearm. If you’ve ever had a sock puppet and know how to make it say “no,” you’ve got the strumming motion down. It’s that easy.

Keeping your hand close while strumming allows you all sorts of control when it comes to dynamics of your playing. Do me a favor – take your right hand and make a karate chop on your right leg. If you’re left handed, do it with your left hand on your right leg. Notice which part of your hand strikes your leg. It’s the edge along the pinky, right? That’s the part of your hand you want to use to mute the strings of your guitar.

Taking our same rhythm of playing a downstroke on each beat, we’ll now add a “karate chop,” or muting of the strings (conveniently marked “M” in the above example), in between each beat. So now instead of sounding like quarter notes, we sound like we’re playing in eighth notes even though we’re not really playing on the in-between beats. Pretty sneaky, no?

And for all you nitpickers out there, I should point out that on some of the MP3s of this lesson you might hear a stray bass note where I’m indicating a mute. That’s because I’ve accidentally caught the edge of the pick on the low strings, inadvertently sounding a note. And that’s pretty cool because, as long as I’ve got my chord properly fingered, the stray note should fit in well with what’s going on.

One other thing you can do to help yourself mute the chord is to “choke” it. “Choking” is a technique that, like many guitar techniques, has many names. Whatever you decide to call it, it simply involves lifting the fingers of your fretting hand just enough to deaden the strings that you just fretted to play the chord. Combining choking with muting on your strumming hand gives you that “chunk-a” sound you’ve heard in a lot of rhythm guitar parts. This is also something that requires some practice to get down, but it’s worth the effort. And it’s fun, too, because it’s the kind of “practice” that seems more like goofing around!

Now that we’ve got our strumming set, and we’ve managed to play the introduction, let’s tackle a verse. We want to use the same strum/mute pattern here. Each verse starts with three measures (twelve beats) of Em, followed by a measure of C, followed by a measure that has two beats of C and two of Em. Then the whole process repeats itself:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The only thing that you might want to keep in mind while playing this is to remember how long it takes you to get from the Em to the C chord. Plan ahead! If you have to stop on the ninth beat of the twelve beats of Em to get ready, then do so. Again, the whole point is to be on that C chord right on time, namely on the thirteenth beat of the verse.

Technically, you could play the whole song like this and be perfectly fine. But I’d like to use the choruses of Eleanor Rigby as an introduction (or reintroduction to some of you) of “slash chords.” When you play a chord on the guitar, you usually use the lowest root note of the given chord (that’s the note that has the same name as the chord – C is the root note of C while E is the root note of Em) as your bass note. Sometimes, though, you want a note other than the root note to be in the bass. This is where slash chords come in.

A slash chord looks like two chords with a slash (“/”) between them. Something like this:

Em/D

Whenever you see a slash chord, simply remember that the chord is to the left of the slash and the note on the right side of it indicates a new bass note. So in this example, we want to play an Em chord, but we want to have a note in the bass. In other words we want the D note to be the lowest note of our Em chord.

Slash chords can cause confusion. In the above example we are technically creating a new chord, an Em7, when we add the D note to the Em chord. So if we were being sticklers for protocol, we’d call it “Em7/D.” But slash chords don’t always create new chords. Suppose we wanted an Em chord with B as our bass note. B is part of the Em chord, so writing it as “Em/B” is perfectly correct. Many times, these notes are thought of as “passing tones” – they are simply meant to highlight our moving from one chord to another. So don’t worry too much about what they are called. Worry instead about how to play the original chord and the new bass note.

Take a minute and strum four measures of Em while singing the chorus of Eleanor Rigby. That’s the “…all the lonely people where do they all come from…” part. Sounds a bit drab, no? We’ll eliminate that drabness with a moving bass line, courtesy of four slash chords:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

If you looked only at the chord names, you might be tempted to give up! Look instead at the TAB. All you’re doing is playing a single note, your new bass note from the slash chord, on the first beat of each measure and following that bass note with three downstrokes of the top three strings, which conveniently happen to be an Em chord!

Let’s cover this in a little more detail: We want to play an Em/D chord, which means that we want an Em chord but one using D (instead of E) as its bass note. The lowest D we can find on our guitar, without retuning it (!) is the D note of the open D string. So that becomes our new bass note and the three open strings above it are the rest of the Em chord. The next chord, Em/C# is an Em chord (again, the open first three strings) with C# (fourth fret of the A string) in the bass. Our third slash chord is Em/C, which means that C (third fret of the A string) is our bass note and we’re still using the first three strings for the Em chord. On Em/B, the final slash chord of the chorus, we’ll revert back to a “normal” Em fingering, but we’ll be certain to use the B note (second fret of the A string) for the new bass note.

Those of you who tune your guitars manually (without a tuner) and those of you who already have a grasp of where various notes are on the guitar’s fingerboard may ask, “Why not use the fifth fret of the A string for the D note?” And you’d be perfectly correct to do so:

In the various MP3 examples that involve the chorus, this is precisely what I do. The main reason is that I like keeping the various bass notes all on the same string as I feel it gives a nicer tone overall. But it’s strictly up to you. Either method works fine.

You can also use arpeggios to play the chorus instead of this “bass/strum” method:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This is simply one of many examples of an arpeggio pattern. You should, as always, feel free to experiment and come up with some of your own.

And now that you have the introduction, verses and choruses set, you can pretty much play all of Eleanor Rigby. As promised, though, I’d like to give you a few “bonus” touches – little fills that aren’t that hard to learn and can spice up your arrangement a little.

The first “optional riff” appears in the introduction, during the two measures of Em:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This is imitating the prominent string line (I believe on the violin) at this part of the song. You begin with the A note at the second fret of the G string and then play the open B string. Every other note is the open B string, and this technique of using a repeated note in this fashion is called a “pedal point.” You’ll run into it in all types of music from Mozart to Metallica. After hitting the open B the first time, you strike the open G string, then the open B again, then the F# note at the fourth fret of the D string followed again by the open B string. One more strike of the open G string, a hit of the open B, a strike of the E note (second fret of the D string) and a final open B completes the riff.

This may seem a little complicated. But with a surprisingly little amount of concentrated practice, you will find it falls easily into your fingertips. The main concern, once more, is timing. By not playing any rhythm on the third beat, you’ll give yourself plenty of time to get your fingers set for this riff.

Our second optional riff is the string line that ends the song:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

To play this, start out with your regular Em chord but add your pinky to the third fret of the high E (first) string to sound the G note when you make the first strum. Then remove your pinky and play the open first string. Then strike the open B string. Now play the A note on the second fret of the G string. Depending on how you play your Em, you can use whatever finger happens to be free and comfortable. I tend to use my ring finger.

Finally, reform your Em chord and strum down only as far as the open G string. Et voila! You’ve finished the song in fine form!

Here’s a breakdown of how Eleanor Rigby is structured and in the MP3 we’ll go from the interlude (a repeat of the introduction) on through to the end:

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I hope you had fun with this lesson and that you enjoy playing around with this song. There are a lot of things here for a beginner to digest, and that’s simply part of the learning process. Concentrate on one aspect at a time – first working on the chord changes, then on getting the timing correct and then perhaps working on the strumming. It won’t be long before you’re working on various combinations of all the ideas we’ve covered here.

And before you know it, you’ll have another song for your repertoire.

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forum page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Secondly, I do know some songs that were written this century. No lie!

Coldplay is one band I’ve enjoyed since I heard Yellow early one morning at my desk at the ad agency. It was a catchy yet quirky song and that listening to it led me to buying the album Parachutes. Several Coldplay albums later (and you should definitely give their latest release, X and Y a listen), I still find myself enjoying their songs.

So I’ve picked two to use as lessons here at Guitar Noise. Hopefully some time in the next few weeks, I’ll be posting Don’t Panic over on the Songs for Intermediates page and, in the meantime, we’ve got the mysterious and moody God Put A Smile Upon Your Face here on our Easy Songs for Beginners lessons. Which brings us to the usual disclaimer:

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Truth be told, I’ve probably spent way too much time wondering which song to put onto which lesson page. Both are pretty easy and both can teach us some fun things. As songwriters, the members of Coldplay use some very interesting tunings and chord voicings and that in itself makes the songs fun to learn. Since God… is such a snap to play (once you’ve learned the tuning and strumming), I’ve decided to put it here with the “easy beginners” songs. But be forewarned! If you’re simply going to go straight to the MP3s and not read any of the lesson text, you’re going to miss out on some very important material. Not to mention all the great entertainment…

I should mention here that I’m basing this lesson on Coldplay’s Live 2003 CD and not the original version from their album, A Rush Of Blood To The Head. The two versions are very similar and you won’t have anyone screaming at you that you don’t know the song if you go with one over the other.

As noted earlier, Coldplay often makes use of various alternate tunings. On God Put A Smile Upon Your Face, the rhythm guitars (I believe there are two in the original mix) use an open C# tuning. If you’ve read some of our articles on open and alternate tuning here at Guitar Noise, you know that an “open” tuning means that when you strum all six strings of the guitar, you get the chord of the same name of the tuning. That sounds kind of convoluted, doesn’t it? All it means is that when we’ve tuned our guitars to open C# tuning, we’ll get a C# major chord when we strum the open strings.

But don’t go running to your tuners and start changing all your strings around! Not just yet, anyway. We need to take a minute to talk and to think about what exactly we’re going to do.

Let’s first look at our standard tuning and compare it to the tuning we’ll be using on this song:

Now I don’t know about you, but this tuning scares me silly! The idea of tuning my D up to F (or “E#,” since we’re in the key of C# major) conjures up images of busted strings (if I’m really lucky) and cracked saddles (if I’m not so lucky). And that’s without the added strain of tuning up the A and B strings a whole step higher.

What do I do? I could try another open tuning, but I won’t get the particular voicings that make this song sound so cool (is it only me or does anyone else hear traces of Roxy Music’s Out Of The Blue?). I could just pull out my baritone guitar and not worry about it at all, but then what would be the point of writing this lesson? And what about all of you without baritone (or seven string) guitars? So I do the thing I do best – think! And use some easy music theory to help me out. And, of course, and of course you’re just waiting for this, I grab my trusty capo.

To get this particular open C# tuning, I’m tuning up a lot of strings. Let’s see if we can lower our tuning even more and use a capo to bring us back up to C#. How about if I go with open B:

This will make my guitar a whole lot happier! Tuning both E strings down to B will initially sound a little muddy, but then I’ll put my capo on the second fret of the guitar and everything will be back in open C# tuning.

It’s important to note that this is a little involved. But, simply retuning your guitar without thinking about what you’re doing can have dire consequences. I image that you, like me and not like the member of Coldplay, can’t go running out and getting a new guitar each time you bust an old one. And if you can, please write me so we can discuss some charity work…

Seriously, taking a little time to analyze a tuning can only help you (and your faithful guitar) in the long run. And now let’s get to playing our featured song!

Structurally, God Put A Smile Upon Your Face is very simple. There is a “verse section” of four measures that are repeated four times (this section also serves as the song’s intro as well as an “instrumental buffer” between the verses) and a “bridge” section, again of four measures that get played four times.

And here’s the ridiculously easy part – even though we’re playing this song in the key of C# Major (not the friendliest of keys for any instrument, let alone guitar!) and even though we’ll be seeing chords like C#, E6, D#7(add4) and F#add9, we’re only going to use one chord shape for the entire song! No lie! And this is why I chose this song for the “Beginners” section.

But before we get to the chords, let’s get the basic strumming down. Here is our basic “verse” rhythm pattern, done with the open C# chord:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

As with any strumming pattern, you should experiment with your strokes. You can do this as all down strokes since the song is at a medium pace. I find that I tend to use the strokes I’ve indicated in the notation, although from time to time I catch myself doing an upstroke on the last chord of the measure. When I do that, I tend to play it more like this:

If there’s a trick to this at all, it’s in trying to separate your three bass strings and your three treble strings a little when you strum, particularly at the end of the measure. It’s easy to fall into a “downstroke on the bass and upstroke on the treble” pattern, so take time to find what’s comfortable to you. Not to mention find what sort of sound you like.

Let’s add the rest of the verse chords and you’ll understand what I’m trying to tell you.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Now (and forgive the pun), don’t panic! Don’t look at the chord names, look at their shape. Can you play an open position A chord? Then you can do this without thinking! To get our E6, all we do is take the same fingers we use to fret a standard A chord and place them on the third fret of the fourth, fifth and sixth strings. Move the same shape down to the second fret and you’ve got D#7(add4). At the first fret you’ve created what is, essentially, a Dmaj7 chord (albeit one with an added G# note).

Some of you who have big hands and are playing this on an electric guitar may even be able to form all there chords with your thumb. No pun intended, but more power to you!

Now listen to what we do with the rhythm and with the chord voicing. Our top three strings, now tuned to C#, C# and G# create a drone which plays over and against the changing major chords on the three lower strings. This interplay gives God…its signature sound.

Pay special attention to the fourth measure of our “verse” pattern. The strumming is slightly different and we make the change from D#7 to Dmaj7 a little more interesting by making use of the open low strings.

As always, take the time to get this rhythm into your head and (more importantly) into your hands. It truly won’t take long and you’ll be happy with the results.

Once we have the “verse” section down, we can go on to the “bridge” section:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The rhythmic pattern here is not all that different from the verses. In fact, you might find yourself playing the same pattern as the verses and not noticing! That’s perfectly okay because it will sound perfectly fine. But for those of you who must do everything “by the book,” take a moment to listen to the little variations of the two patterns and you should be fine.

And the chords are still using the same “A on the bass strings” shape as the verse chords! Our Amaj7 is up at the eighth fret (remember we’re still counting the capo as “0″ so that actually means the tenth fret) and the E6 (at the third fret) you already know. Simply slide that up to the fifth fret to get the F#add9.

On the MP3 you’ll hear me also use two other strumming styles for this section. “Full chord strumming,” that is, simply playing the chords and the rhythm without worrying about the actual TAB, sounds very full and contrasts nicely with the strumming we’ve set up for the verse section. Something more along the lines of arpeggios and broken chords also makes for a very pleasant change for both the player and the audience.

Another easy variation here is to use the open C# chord as a “quick change” device. This is the same technique we used way back in Three Marlenas, and using it between the Amaj7 and E6 will help to make that shift down the neck a lot easier. You can also use it to go from the F#add9 to the Amaj7 and even from the Dmaj7(addG#) at the end of the verse.

One reason for all these different types of strumming patterns is that I’ve only got my one guitar and I’m not a machine. Sometimes I like to create spaces and sometimes I like to fill them in – it truly depends on the mood. My mood, that is. When you listen to the last MP3, keep this idea in mind. You’ll hear some of the original patterns because they are great places to start, but then I’ll let the natural rhythm and strumming take over. I say “natural” because, to my ears at least, doing a specific pattern repeatedly not only sounds weird after a time but also feels strange. You should be a fly on the wall when I record these things! As we’ve mentioned in these lessons so many times, you’re the one who gets to call the shots as far as arrangements are concerned.

And that, my friends, is pretty much the whole song. At least for this lesson. Perhaps one day in the future we’ll come back and add the lead electric guitar parts, which aren’t at all that hard to do. But for now, let’s put our “verse” and “bridge” sections together and enjoy the music. The song’s tempo, according to listening to the CD anyway, is about 124 BPM but, naturally, it’s good to start at a slower pace and work your way up to it.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I hope you had fun with this lesson and that you enjoy playing around with this song. Remember that different tunings can make a song very easy to play, but you’ve got to make sure that you’re not going to be doing any lasting damage to your guitar. Think about what you do beforehand and you can almost always avoid problems.

And remember too how amazing some of these simple songs can sound when you’ve taken the time to learn their secrets. A song like God Put A Smile Upon Your Face is an easy addition to your ever-expanding repertoire of pieces and will probably put a smile on the faces of many of your listeners.

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forum page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Now if you’ll excuse me, the warden’s come to take me back to my cell, so until our next lesson…

Peace

So, in part as a thank you to those who attended, and in part as giving some of you a reason to consider attending a Guitar Noise Seminar, I’d like to start the New Year off with a lesson from those sessions, a Neil Young song called Harvest Moon, which first appeared on his 1992 album of the same name.

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Harvest Moon is a big hit at the seminars because it’s one of those songs that is very easy to learn (we’ve only got D, Em, G and A chords) and, once you know a couple of quick things about it, even easier to play. And it also sounds great!

And speaking of sounding great, I suppose that this is a good place to remind everyone that this lesson is an arrangement for a single guitar, so it’s not going to sound exactly like the recorded version. The important things that we’re going to learn are using chord shapes and getting our strumming down. Oh, and I guess I should mention we’ll be learning some things about Drop D tuning!

You don’t have to play Harvest Moon in Drop D, but I think it sounds better that way. We will need to learn two new versions of some chords we already know, but you’ll be amazed at how easy these new chord forms will be. If you’d prefer to not tune your guitar to Drop D, then simply use the regular versions of two of the chords we’ll need (Em7 and G6) and ignore my use of the sixth string in this lesson.

I should also make mention of the fact that this is a terrific song to play on the twelve string, particularly because of the different chord voicings we’ll use. And just so you don’t have to take my word for it, I’ll include an MP3 of a verse and chorus done on my twelve-string guitar when we get done discussing things.

For now though, let’s take a quick moment and retune our guitars. To go from standard tuning to Drop D, we want to lower the sixth (low E) string down one step so that it becomes a D note. If you have a chromatic tuner, you shouldn’t have any problems with this. If you have a “regular” tuner, then use the “D,” or fourth string, setting to get the string in tune. If you’re like me and don’t own a tuner, then lower your string about a step (I usually play the open D (fourth) string in order to roughly match it by the octave) and then fine tune by either one of two ways: matching the seventh fret of the newly tuned sixth string to the open A string (instead of the fifth as you’d normally do); or match the twelfth fret harmonic of the newly tuned sixth string to the open D (fourth) string. Hopefully none of this will take you very long. After all, you’ve already done this in lessons as recent as the one on Amazing Grace. If worst comes to worst, go to the first MP3 and we can tune together.

Once we’re in Drop D, we can turn to the particular quirks of Harvest Moon. For starters, there’s the very distinctive guitar part at the very beginning. A “hook,” if you will, that draws us immediately into the song. We’ll call it the “signature hook” because when you play it, people will say “Oh wow! That’s Harvest Moon! I didn’t know you could play that!” And instead of just showing it to you, I’d like to demonstrate how I figured out what my ears told me was happening. Consider this a little bonus ear training, if you’d like. I don’t think I even covered this in the seminars!

If you listen to the beginning of this song very carefully, you’ll hear the top note of the guitar, the melody line, moving from A, which you can find at the fifth fret of the high E (first) string, to B (at the seventh fret) and finally ending on C#, which is the note at the ninth fret. Those of you who own the CD can play along with the track and find out for yourselves. And while you’re doing so, you’ll also hear that all of this note movement happens over a D major chord. There’s also a little bit of slight dissonance going on and we’ll attend to that in just a moment because it turns out to be kind of important!

But first off, let’s remind ourselves that adding C# to the D major chord gives us Dmaj7. I hate to tell you, but knowing this is important because it allows you to puzzle together exactly how to play this little hook. Because I’ve taken the time to study where the notes are on my guitar (and also in part because I’ve read the column Moving On Up!), I can play Dmaj7 in three positions:

Having these three versions of the chord to work with, I try to see how I can best work in that little A – B – C# melody. One thing I’m absolutely certain of now that I’ve been playing along with the CD, and that’s I want to end the signature hook on Version Three of this chord. But how do I get there? Starting with Version One seems kind of silly, since the A note I want isn’t there and I’d have to come up with a convoluted fingering of the chord simply to get the note I want. Nevertheless, I try out these two methods:

Right now we’re simply concerned with getting the correct voicing and not with worrying about the rhythm. And while both of these examples work, I’ve problems with them. First off, they’re too much work! If you think about it, the last thing a singer/songwriter wants is a guitar part that’s going to be so much work that he or she can’t go with the “singer” part of the program! That makes some sense, doesn’t it? And if you’re not happy with that thought, then take comfort in the fact that I don’t think that either of these examples sounds like what I’m trying to imitate.

So I start out with Version Three of the Dmaj7 chord and I think, “What if I only strum down to the A note, which is on the tenth fret of the B string, then add the B note at the twelfth fret and then finish off with the full chord?” So I give that a try and it’s the closest I’ve yet come to my target. But it’s still slightly not quite right. Remember that little dissonance we spoke of earlier? It’s nowhere to be heard in this latest version of mine. So I listen closely to the CD again and I make an interesting discovery: the dissonance is ringing, like an open string! So I leave my high E (first) string open when I strike the first two chords and guess what? I’ve found it! Here it is:

This works out really nicely. The open first (high E) string provides the subtle dissonance, while the A and B notes, even though played on the B string, stand out because they are higher in pitch. This voicing fits the “easy to play” requirement as well. If you remember to keep your ring and middle fingers set (ring finger on the eleventh fret of the G string and middle finger on the tenth fret of the B string), then it’s just a matter of using your pinky to get the B note at the twelfth fret of the B string and then remove it while placing your index finger on the ninth fret of the high E (first) string for the last chord. All I need do now is to come up with a nice strumming pattern and I’m ready to go:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I say “a nice strumming pattern” instead of “the patented strumming pattern” because I know something that you all should know by now, especially if you’ve been reading my lessons for any length of time. There is really no set pattern. In the second audio example of the MP3 you just heard, I deliberately play the signature hook with slightly different timings than the one I wrote out. If I heard someone playing any of them, I’d know this song. And so would you. So don’t give yourself grief trying to nail down one particular pattern. It’s much more important to be able to flow with the song and to keep the feel of the rhythm going than it is to worry about a misplaced upstroke!

Likewise, because of the Drop D tuning, you should feel free to hit as many notes on your downstrokes and upstrokes as you’d like. You can hear that sometimes on the first beat I hit only the sixth (low D) string but other times I hit the sixth and fifth strings and occasionally I’m pretty certain I struck the sixth, fifth and fourth strings on the first beat. As long as you’re keeping the chord formed with your fretting hand, there aren’t any wrong notes to worry about.

Once you have the signature hook down, you’ve really got most of Harvest Moon down. As far as structure, this song goes like this:

Of course, we have to remember that we’re in Drop D tuning, so we need to learn new ways of playing a few of these chords! And, as promised, you should find two of these chords ridiculously easy:

For the Em7 chord, we form a regular Em and we move our fingers to the two lowest strings. So we’re covering the second fret of the fifth (A) and sixth (low D) strings instead of the second fret of the D and A strings as we normally would. I usually use my middle finger on the sixth string and my ring finger on the fifth, but I do find myself fretting this chord with my index and middle fingers (sixth and fifth strings, respectively) from time to time. If you’re wondering why this works out so well, then take a moment to think about it. The easiest Em7 fingering, in standard tuning, involves placing one finger on the second fret of the A string. This gives you, low to high, E, B, D, G, B and E as your notes. Please take notice of the fact that your top four strings, as well as the sixth, are all played open. In Drop D tuning, our lowest string is D and we could certainly use that as the bass note and still have the same chord, only now we’d call it “Em/D.” But it doesn’t sound as nice as having that E note in the bass. So we place a finger on the second fret of the sixth string to get that note back.

To give you more interesting things to think about: We’ve seen that the notes of Em7 are E (root), G (minor third), B (fifth) and D (seventh). Guess what the notes of G6 are? Kudos to those of you who said, “Hey! Aren’t they the same notes?” Indeed they are! G6 is made up of G (root), B (major third), D (fifth) and E (sixth). So if you wanted to, you could play the same fingering and get the same chord. We’d technically want to call it “G6/E” to indicate the E note in the bass.

But we really want the G note in the bass, so let’s move the Em7 chord shape up from the second fret to the fifth. Now your notes (again, low to high) are G, D, D, G, B, E and that fits the bill perfectly. How about that? We learned two chords in a new tuning faster than it takes the time to explain it!

Taking the first line of the verse, I like to strum the first beat of Em7 with a leisurely upstroke and then really hit the downstroke on the second beat to put an accent on it. This is a way to create some dynamics in what might otherwise be a very typical strumming pattern. Plus, as you’ll hear in a moment, I play the upstroke very close to the saddle of my guitar, which gives it a kind of shimmering sound. Again, this is just a way of coming up with something to spice things up a bit.

Harvest Moon is also a kind of fun song in that all the vocals pretty much take place in the first half of any given line during the verse. This leaves you with four measures of D that you should consider “free time.” And by that I don’t mean that you can start playing at any tempo or time signature you choose! Rather, this is a place where you can mess around and be a little creative with your playing. D is one of the easiest chords to create little fills around, as we’ve seen in numerous lessons. I’ll write out what I tend to do, as well as a few suggestions for alternate patterns (which you should also hear in the MP3), but I highly encourage you to experiment and come up with things of your own.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

There are, naturally, all sorts of ways to strum this. I like the lazy feeling of the rhythm pattern that I set up with the first measure of Em7, so I essentially try to stick with that during most of the rest of the song. To make it more interesting, I will stick in a measure of single notes to break it up. In the second measure of this example you can see and hear what I’m talking about. And here again, it’s important to know that these are just the strings I happened to strike this time when I was recording. When I play this next, I might hit a totally different sequence and that will sound perfectly fine as long as I’ve got my Em7 chord in place on the fretboard. You should hear that sometimes I hit that last note in the second measure of Em7 and sometimes I don’t. And that’s just the sort of thing I’m talking about. You should take the time to have fun trying out all sorts of different ideas and not worry if you find yourself playing different notes than mine (or even different notes than the last time you played it!).

We go through this first line again for the second line and then we come to the G6 that starts the third line. I like to use the same upstroke as I do on the Em7 because it gives a bit of a surprise when it ends up on a different bass note. Always keep your listeners on their toes! I keep to the same rhythmic pattern of one measure of strumming and then a measure of arpeggio throughout the G6 part and then when we come to the D, I play the signature hook twice. For me, this is a good reason to play the measure of arpeggio immediately beforehand. Playing the last part of the arpeggio is on the open strings gives me plenty of time to get myself down the neck and set to play the hook.

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If you were listening carefully to the MP3 that accompanies Example #8, you should have heard me do a slight variation on the strumming of the G6 the second time around. I’ve included this notation as well. It’s simply hitting the bass notes on the first beat and then following it up with a slow downstroke of the full G6 chord, again played with the strumming hand very close to the bridge of the guitar. While it is very similar to the rhythm that we’ve been using, it’s different enough to give us a little more color.

And for those of you who like to be a little flashy, listen to the very last MP3 example, which, as I mentioned, is done on the twelve-string guitar, you’ll hear me use the harmonics at the twelfth fret as another way to get my fingers up the neck of the guitar ahead of time in this particular section of the song. I may not have written this out entirely correctly, because (as I’ve mentioned over and over again) I tend to play it slightly differently each time, but it should be something like this:

Or this should give you a good place to start and then to experiment trying your own ways.

The chorus of Harvest Moon is just more strumming, this time playing around with A7 chords. There are all sorts of fun ways of playing this. For starters, I like to use the same type of strumming pattern that I used with the Em7 and the G6, only this time without the long upstroke on the first beat. This really emphasizes the chord on the second beat and that gives the chorus a lot of punch:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You may notice to very interesting fills here. In the fourth measure I echo the melody line (“… I want to see you dance again …”) on the top two strings, using my pinky to get the F# note (second fret of the first (high E) string) and D note (third fret of the B string). Playing A7 makes this pretty easy to do, and having given my pinky a big workout during the lesson on The Little Drummer Boy doesn’t hurt, either!

And even though I like this fill a lot, on the final MP3, I use a more conventional one:

This is just playing around between A7sus4, A7 and A7sus2, which is something that many of you are already doing, I’m sure. It’s another easy fill to use when you’d like to not stay on the same chord for a great length of time.

On the last Mp3, you’ll also hear me use arpeggios for the second measure of A7sus4. This is certainly something you should feel comfortable playing. The choice (and many others as well) is totally up to you.

The fill in measure eight of the chorus should get a little extra attention:

Those of you who have either looked at some of the Songs for Intermediates Lessons, such as Babylon or Give A Little Bit, as well as those of you who can remember all the way back to our beginners’ lesson on Riders On The Storm may vaguely remember me doing something like this. It’s a little trick I tend to throw in a lot when going from A7 to D, which I call an “A7 turnaround.” You’ll see it again when I post up a lesson on John Lennon’s Imagine.

The best way to do this smoothly is to use your middle finger on the D string and to keep it there, sliding up the frets, from the second to the fourth, the fourth to the fifth and the fifth to the sixth, with each change of notes. Use your ring finger on the B string when you need the same fret (second, fifth and sixth) and your index finger when you’re a fret apart (the third fret of the B string on the second set of notes). This is a good exercise to get your fingers used to, because you’ll encounter this sort of finger movement a lot in guitar music.

Some people like it a lot and some don’t. In order to fit into the timing of this particular version, I add an extra chromatic step. That last set of notes, taken purely on their own and out of context, is very dissonant. But it goes by quicker than you’ll know and I like it a lot, especially on the twelve-string guitar.

After eight measures of switching between A7sus4 and A7, the chorus ends with the signature hook, which usually gets played four times. By now you should be pretty adept at this, so why don’t we have a look and listen to the whole thing? And just to drive home a point or two, see how many “new” patterns I used in the strumming without even thinking twice about it! It’s great when you get into a song and things simply come to you and the more you work at this, the easier it will become.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I hope you had fun with this lesson and that you enjoy playing around with this song. It’s amazing how a simple little hook can make an entire song! But don’t forget that there’s still the whole rest of the song to deal with and you can come up with a lot of little things to make it both interesting and fun to play as well as to listen to.

Remember, too, that you should give care and attention to any song you decide to play. People enjoy knowing that the performer (in this case, you!) is having a good time playing something. It would be easy enough to go through the motions on a simple song but you, your audience and the song itself deserve better than that. Have fun with whatever you decide to play!

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns, criticisms or whatever you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

And there’s also all the usual “riders” to the disclaimer – this isn’t a note-for-note-taken-directly-from-the-original-recording and on and on and on…Maybe I should just ask if we’re all beyond this sort of thing by now? That way we can move straight on to the fun stuff!

And today’s lesson will (hopefully) certainly be fun. We’re going to work on Nowhere Man, a song penned by John Lennon for the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album. This will be one of those lessons where you’ll have several options open to you as far as how you’d like to play it. We’ll start with the very basics, chords and strumming, and then see what we can do to make it more of an actual arrangement.

On the original recording, Nowhere Man is in the key of E. We’re going to play it in the key of D, which means that if you want to play along with the record, CD, radio or whatever (and that includes the MP3s accompanying this lesson), you’ll want to put your capo on the second fret of your guitar.

And this brings up an important point. A reader wrote me an email shortly after the Intermediate lesson on Your Song, asking if it was necessary to play with the capo at all. For that particular lesson, I had advised using the capo on the third fret but the song sounded perfectly fine to him without using one at all.

My suggestions for capo use, just like my suggestions for fingerings and chords, are simply suggestions. Usually I try to play the song in the same key as the original recording. That way if you want to play along, you should be able to. But what key you play a song in has to be your decision. Sometimes I can’t sing a song in the same key as it is on the recording. I imagine that many of you have run into this sort of thing. The capo allows you to find a new key in which to play the song without the added pain of relearning it in another key. Sometimes it’s not your singing, but the singer you’re accompanying who needs a change of key to make the song work. Sometimes, as in a lesson such as Scarborough Fair or Losing My Religion, it’s a matter of being able to get the right sound (or fingering) on the guitar. We’ll explore this more thoroughly over the summer when, fingers crossed, we tackle Hotel California, and then with Sultans of Swing; both songs will get lessons here and on the Intermediates page as well.

Anyway, the point is not to worry about the capo placement. If it sounds perfectly fine to you without a capo and it’s in your (or your vocalist’s) vocal range, then play away by all means!

Basic Arrangement

Getting back to the song at hand, let’s look at a basic strumming pattern that will cover the entire song, should we decide to play it that way:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This is as basic as it gets. I’ve put two strumming patterns here and I’m hoping that by now you might understand why. Pattern One (in measure one) and Pattern Two differ only in that the second pattern has a final upstroke on the last half-beat. What happens is that I start out on Pattern One and then occasionally catch the strings on that last half-beat, creating Pattern Two. So I figured, why not write out both and let you choose which to use? More often than not when strumming this song, I’ll switch between the two patterns without a thought and perhaps you will, too.

Now that you have the strumming, let’s take a look at three chords with which you might not be familiar:

And, guess what? It’s time for a little theory lesson. Say you’re playing a cheat sheet (otherwise called a “chord sheet” as you’ll see almost immediately below – this is what passes for “TAB” on a lot of Internet sites) and you run into a minor chord that you’ve never seen before. Do you panic? No! You simply follow these three easy steps:

1) Find the note of the root of the minor chord on the first (high E) string.

2) Barre the first three strings at that fret.

3) Play only the three strings you’ve barred.

If you’ve read my column Moving On Up, you probably are already aware of this wonderful built-in quirk of the guitar. Here’s another: Say you’re playing the same (or a different) cheat sheet and you see a minor seventh chord you’ve never played before. What do you do? Just slightly change the second and third steps of what you did a moment ago:

1) Find the note of the root of the minor chord on the first (high E) string.

2) Barre the first four strings at that fret.

3) Play only the four strings you’ve barred.

Nothing to it! Now, equipped with this bit of knowledge and a little bit more theory (what notes are used to make a particular chord), let’s tackle two of these new chords, shall we?

First up is the G minor chord. Just to remind you, this chord is made up of the notes G, Bb and D. Most beginners learn to finger this chord thusly:

You can see that this fingering follows what I told you a moment ago – you barre the first three strings of the third fret (go on and guess what note on the third fret of the first (high E) string is!) and play those. Since D is a note of this chord, the open D string is fair game as well.

When you get to the point where you’re playing full barre chords, you learn that you can also play the Gm like this:

Here you’re barring the entire third fret across all six strings with your index finger and then fretting the fifth fret on the A string (usually with your ring finger) and also the fifth fret of the D string (usually with the pinky) to complete the chord. Let me go on record and say that you can play either of these fingerings for the Gm chord when you see it come up in the song. I want to add this new fingering, the first one in Example #1a, to your repertoire. To get this, I barre the first three strings with my ring finger and use my thumb to get the G note in the bass (the third fret of the sixth (low E) string). By reaching around with my thumb, I can also get enough of the A string to deaden it, and that muting of the A string allows me to strum across all six strings.

I do a similar thing with the F#m7 (the second chord in Example #1a), but here the A note is part of the F#m7 chord (F#, A, C# and E), so I can leave the A string open. Again, I find this easiest to play by using my ring finger to barre across the first four strings. You may have better success, on either or both of these chords, with your middle finger or first finger. Play around with different fingerings and see (and hear) which one works best for you.

As for the A7sus4, I think that you should have no trouble playing this at all. And we’ll get into my reasons for using it a little later. Right now, let’s take a look at how Nowhere Man plays out. Here’s a chord chart, cheat sheet, whatever you’d like to call it. Use our basic strumming pattern (Example #1) throughout the song. Each chord is held for one measure (four beats) except for the D chord at the end of each verse, which is played for two measures (eight beats). If you need to hear it, play the MP3 for Example #3 for the verse (playing two measures of D at the end instead of the one measure of the riff that’s on the MP3), and listen to the MP3 accompanying Example #5 for the strumming of the bridge. Then come back and try it out:

Congratulations! You now have this song added to your ever-growing catalog of material. And if you’d like to hang around and work on arranging this a little more, throwing in that little riff I mentioned and even coming up with something to play during the “instrumental verse,” then by all means, please do!

Before we go on, though, I’d like to address two things that may have caught the eagle eyes of those of you who live and die by the Holy TABs. I use an Em instead of a G for the fifth measure of the verses, the line that starts “Making all…” This is indeed at odds with most versions of the song. Since the E note (actually F# when you take the capo into account) is in the melody, I use the Em chord to help me find it when I’m singing. You’ll also see me use this to create a nice effect in our instrumental verse a little later. If my doing so truly offends you, then think of the Em as a G6 and maybe it won’t seem so bad!

Likewise, in the bridge, I take a little liberty with the last line. Most texts will show it like this:

Nowhere (F#m) Man the (G) world is at your command (A7)

The G, in this instance, gets two full measures. When we get to the section on the bridge, I hope to explain my reasoning behind this and I hope you will find it interesting and perhaps even educational.

Adding To The Interest

As we’ve seen in many of our song lessons, once you’ve got the basics of the song down, you can then start on making your arrangement more interesting. The first addition we’ll work on is the “signature riff,” or hook, if you will. At the end of each verse, there’s a little guitar lick that serves almost as a punctuation mark. It fills the first of the final two measures of D and it goes like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

In and of itself, this probably presents no challenge to you whatsoever. But that’s why we want to work on it. It’s one thing to play a riff out of context. It’s quite another to play it as part of a song, especially if you’re the only one playing! So, think about it – you’re going to be strumming the Gm chord, then you’re going to play this riff and then you’ve got a measure of D to strum again. What are you going to do?

The sanest solution is to figure out how to incorporate this little riff into your switching of the chords. Since we want to end on a D chord, let’s see if we can work out how to play it while holding onto the D chord.

That’s what you’re seeing and hearing in the second half of this example. We start with a partial chord, the open D string and the A note located at the second fret of the G string. I want to finger this just like I would a normal D chord, in other words, with my index finger. By this time, I also have my ring finger on the D note (at the third fret of the B string) and I might also have my middle finger on the second fret of the first (high E) string. Removing the index finger gives me the open G, which is the second note of this riff. Now I want to use my pinky to get the F# at the fourth fret of the D string. This can be a bit of a stretch for some of you! But, what better time to get started on such things, right? Releasing the pinky gives you the open D string and then you finish by playing the open A.

Like everything else, this may take some practice. But once you can handle this fingering, you’ll find it easy to get right back into the basic strumming pattern. More importantly, you’ll be getting your pinky into the action, which is going to be fairly vital to you as you develop more and more skills as a guitarist. It’s important to start somewhere, you know! Anyway, let’s take a look at the second verse and see how this plays out:

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Now that’s pretty smooth, right? Can you hear how seamlessly we go from the strumming to the riff and then right back into the strumming again? When you add the vocals, it will be even more striking.

And speaking of vocals, how about we make an introduction for the song? On the original recording, Nowhere Man opens up with a three-part a cappella singing of the first verse. A cappella, in case you didn’t know, is a fancy way of saying “someone forget to plug in the amplifiers.” You can tell I’ve been hanging around Nick too long! Seriously, despite its original meaning, we now use this term to indicate that it will be “voices only” or “unaccompanied singing.” And while I may be willing to try many things, I’m not certain I’d be up to starting a song all on my lonesome! So what I propose to do is something incredibly simple, let my guitar back me up, albeit minimally. Let’s play a whole note chord in each measure and then finish with the signature riff and see how that works:

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Simplistic, but effective, I think. Here you can hear how using an Em in the fourth measure instead of the G prescribed in most TABs gives us a lot more oomph for the melody line. Later, I’ll show you another chord substitution that might make your arrangement even more interesting.

But I did promise I’d discuss the bridge, so let’s turn our attention there, shall we? On the surface, there’s really not much to note. We’re going to use our basic strumming pattern throughout and make a minor change in the chords in the last three measures:

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And, as promised, let’s discuss the last four measures. In order to show you more clearly, I’ve taken the liberty of writing out the chord changes as whole notes, which you can see here:

Do me a favor and play this as I’ve written it out, taking special care not to hit the first (high E) string on the last two chords. Can you hear how we’ve created a descending harmony line, from F# (F#m7) to E (Em) to D (A7sus4) and finally to C# in the A7 chord?

This is my sneaky way of providing some “back-up vocals” to the song. It may not seem like a lot to you; in fact, it is a pretty subtle thing to do. But it’s these subtle things that will add to your style as you progress.

It’s important to note that I couldn’t do something like this if I were a stickler for playing the TAB “verbatim.” If I’d gone from the F#m to G to another measure of G, I wouldn’t have been able to put the E note in the second measure. The D I could manage by switching to the 32003X fingering of G. I could have used Em7 (02203X) instead of A7sus4, but I find that I prefer the latter chord choice.

Does this make a big difference to the person listening to the song? No, not really. Somewhere in the back of your listener’s brain, something may stir. But before he or she can register what you did, it’s gone and you’re back to the verse of the song again.

I tell you this sort of thing for a very specific reason: if you truly want to get better at the guitar, not to mention music in general, you’re going to want to learn how to come up with things like this. It’s not that hard; by experimenting and listening to how chords play against each other, you’re already taking the big steps towards thinking for yourself.

So let’s think even harder and tackle the third verse. You know, the “instrumental” one!

Say what you will about pop songs, because of their structure and relatively short length, coming up with an instrumental, even when you’re the only instrument playing, isn’t all that hard. The challenging thing is to not lose any momentum or create any obvious gaps when switching from one part of the song to the next.

In Nowhere Man, each verse is only eight measures long. At tempo, this amounts to not quite twenty seconds in length. No time at all, really, even though it might seem like forever when you’re in the middle of playing it!

Since we’re beginners and since this is an “Easy Songs for Beginners” lesson, let’s take the easiest possible approach: the melody. And in case you’re not sure what the melody of the verse sounds like, I’ll write it out for you:

Our objective is to strum in such a way so that we bring out as much of the melody to the foreground as we possibly can. And yes, this is one of those sneaky things I do to show you why things like chord melodies, such as we’ve been learning in articles like Birth of a Chord Melody, Arranging Things and Something To Sleep On can be important for you to know regardless of what type of music you play! Here’s what I’ve come up with for us with this particular song:

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You should have no problem picking out the melody in the first three measures. It’s merely a matter of being careful what strings you’re emphasizing with your strumming. But in the fourth measure, I pull a bit of a conjuring act. For the first grouping of notes, the melody is right there on the A note (second fret of the G string). Then, I lose it for an instant by playing a Dsus2sus4, which is essentially a D chord played with only the note on the B string. The open G is the melody note but it gets drowned out by the open high E of the first string. But by playing a D chord immediately after this, I get the melody line back, albeit an octave higher than where I originally started. And being an octave higher, as you can readily hear, really makes the melody stand out!

Now we’re set to do a little bit of magic with the chords. You probably have already had enough of my going on and on and on about the Em, but I should warn you purists that you’re in for an even wilder ride! Look what we can do with this by simply following the melody line:

Starting with our normal garden variety Em chord, I add my pinky (yes, more work for the poor little digit!) to the third fret of the high E (first) string in order to get the G note in the melody.

And then things get even more interesting! The melody note is F#, but it’s played over a Gm chord. So we’re going to manage both of these feats by playing what’s called a G minor major seventh!. I kid you not! Check out the column Building Additions (and Suspensions) if you want to learn more about this, but for now use your index finger on the second fret of the high E (first) string to get the F# note. Your ring finger should fret the D note (third fret of the B string) and your middle finger will be on the Bb, located on the third fret of the G string. Use the open D string as your bass note unless you feel comfortable wrapping your thumb around to get the G note on the third fret of the sixth (low E) string and to mute the A string. That’s not easy, but it can become easy with practice.

Once you have this chord and you’ve played the it to get the F# melody note on the top, remove your index finger to get the open E note (first string) to continue the melody line and then hit the B and G strings for the next partial chord. Strike the open first string again and you’re almost home!

When we get to the last two measures of the verse, I feel that the signature riff is more important than the melody at this point, so I go back to that. And now we’ve finished our “instrumental” and are ready to continue on with the song. Not bad for twenty seconds, eh?

In the last MP3, you may also hear some “extraneous” strumming. Basically, my hand is keeping the rhythm throughout, constantly moving up and down. Sometimes you hit a string or two. That’s why, to me anyway, it’s important to have the chords in place. That way anything I hit will sound like it belongs there.

My trouble is, having come up with this cool instrumental section, I find it hard to not play aspects of it during the regular verses, which is what I’m trying to get you to hear in the second twenty seconds of that last MP3. Sometimes I’ll even use the Em to Gm-maj7 progression in my introduction because I like really the way it sounds and can’t get enough of it!

But, very fortunately, the last four measures are what also make up the outro, so I do get a chance to play them twice more. On the final pass we’ll play a resounding, ringing D chord to end the song.

I hope you had fun with this lesson and that you forgive the little liberties I tend to take with arrangements. As I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions, it’s important to let the music dictate what happens in a song. Sometimes a slight chord substitution can make all the difference in a piece, particularly if you’re going it solo.

And remember that in order to experiment, it helps to know a few basic things, or at least to take down notes so that you don’t have to learn it all from scratch later! Don’t be afraid of knowledge, no matter how you come by it. The more you learn, the more you’ll have at your beck and call when it counts.

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forum page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Truth be told, though, I learned an awful lot about the guitar, acoustic and electric, from Neil Young. So it’s not by chance that he makes several appearances both here and on the Songs for Intermediates page. And danged if he isn’t back again! And so’s this:

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Okay, I think I’m better now…

The lessons to be learned from Mr. Young are numerous, but for today we’re going to focus on one aspect in particular, that of creating new and different chords from chords we already know. Sound complicated? Hopefully you won’t think so after we work our way through Neil’s song Old Man, from the classic album, Harvest.

Old Man is a fairly simple song, believe it or not. You’ll (hopefully) be surprised at how easy this is to pick up. The trickiest part occurs right at the start. Here we have two main things with which to concern ourselves: timing and a strange chord voicing. Let’s tackle those in reverse order.

First off, make your normal open position D major chord. Your middle finger is on the second fret of the first (high E) string, your ring finger occupies the third fret of the B and your index finger plays the second fret of the G string. Is everyone okay with this? Good!

Now, take your middle finger off the first string, letting the open high E string ring free. This, by the way, is the chord Dsus2. Some people call it a D(add9). But that’s none of our concern at present. Maybe we’ll come back to it…

All right, then, keeping your index and ring fingers in their current shape, slide them both up the neck so that your ring finger is now on the sixth fret of the B string and your index finger sits on the fifth fret of the G. Now strum all your strings except the sixth (low E) string. You can also choose to not strike the open A string as well. Sound familiar? That’s our opening chord!

“Cool,” you might say. “But what the heck is it?” Well, let’s figure that out by examining the notes we’re playing. The open first string is (obviously) E, and the open D and A strings, strangely enough, are D and A respectively. The note on the sixth fret of the B string is F and that’s a C you’re playing at the fifth fret of the G string. So we’ve got, low to high, A, D, C, F and E.

As you probably know, any chord can go by several names. Since the tonal center of the song Old Man is D, I’m going to call this particular chord Dm9. It’s a D minor chord (D, F and A) with the addition of both the flatted seventh (C) and the ninth (E), so that makes sense to me. Technically, we probably should be calling it Dm9/A since the A is the bass note, but, as you’ll soon see, I may or may not decide to play it. So let’s just stick with Dm9 to keep things relatively simple.

The opening of the song consists of switching from this chord to your “regular” D major chord. Have a look and listen:

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Oh, yes! There’s that matter of the timing…

In this section of the song the timing of the individual measures changes. The first measure is four beats of Dm9, then there is a measure of two beats of the same chord and then we finish with a four-beat measure of D major. Then we repeat the whole process. That measure of D, by the way, is interesting in and of itself and we’ll get to that in just a moment.

If it helps (and I know it helped me when I was learning it), think of the lyrics while playing this section. That will definitely help you with keeping the right timing. The line “old man look at my life” fills the first measure of four beats. “I’m a lot like…” takes up two beats and when we get to the words “you were” we want to be on the D major chord. Or, if you’d like, simply count it out, as I have in the MP3. Whatever works best.

For this strumming pattern, I’ve indicated the strokes (“U” for up or “D” for down) that I use. Notice that on occasion I’ll strike just the open high E (first) string on the upstroke. It’s the tension between the E note and the F note (sixth fret on the B string) that creates the interesting dissonance here, all of which is resolved when we get to the F# (second fret, first string) that’s part of the D major chord. And it’s all done in an incredibly simple way.

Speaking of simple, during that measure of D I use a technique that probably all of you know already just from fooling around with your guitars. Starting again with your normal D chord, add your pinky to the third fret of the high E (first) string. You’ve now made what’s called Dsus4. Take your pinky off again for the D, then totally open up the first string by removing your middle finger for the Dsus2. Then it’s back to the normal D to round things off.

I think it’s pretty important here to try to catch the D (third fret of the B string) as the final note of this sequence; it makes a great melody line for the guitar. So give a little care to the partial chords I’ve written for this measure. You don’t have to hit them exactly, but I do think you’ll find that careful string striking will produce more interesting lines than just banging your way through the chords.

But you don’t have to even use strummed chords all the way through. Here’s something a little closer to the actual recording:

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In this example, we’re playing the Dm9 with arpeggio strumming, all single notes. Almost all, I should say. Start by having your fingers in place for the Dm9 chord and then remove your index finger from the G string, leaving it open. Now strike the open D and G strings (told you we didn’t have to hit the A!) and then hammer-on your index finger at the fifth fret and continue with the rest of the arpeggio. And in case you happen to be wondering, I am using a pick for this. A medium one, if I recall correctly.

The important thing to do here is to experiment and play around. You may find that you prefer a combination of arpeggio and straight strumming, as opposed to all one or all the other. I have to tell you that I had to make a special effort to play it the same way each time!

Which didn’t last when I reached the measure of D! In this example, I hit the bass note on the first beat and immediately follow it up with a downstroke of the full chord, letting it ring a bit before doing the D, Dsus4, D, Dsus2, D thing. This creates an interesting change in the dynamics, since the full chord is coming slightly off the beat. Things like that can sound pretty cool, so it’s a good technique to practice.

By the way, the notes in parentheses (these things, ( ) in case you didn’t know) are notes that I hear myself hitting on the MP3 but didn’t mean to do. This happens sometimes. But, as I’ve made a point of telling you for some time now, it doesn’t really change anything. Feel free to play this note for note, but I’d really prefer you use it as a stepping stone for trying other patterns.

And speaking of other patterns, when I come around to the second pass of this measure on the MP3, I’m playing this:

The only real difference here is playing two single eighth notes to start out the measure. This rhythm is more like the rhythm we’ll be using for the verses.

“And what about that?” you might well ask. And I’m glad you did. Do you remember our rhythms for Heart of Gold or Wild World? This one’s pretty much the same. No lie. So I decided to throw in a bit of a bass line to give you something a tad more challenging:

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The same strumming guidelines apply here as apply to Wild World: on the first beat (the two eighth notes), feel free to play a single note, a partial chord, a single palm muted string, multiple palm muted strings, whatever happens to catch your fancy. You’ll notice that I incorporate all of those techniques during the course of playing this.

And do try to work in this bass line in the second measure (the one that goes from C to G), even though you won’t hear it on the record! Why? Because these little things are good to practice and when you’re playing without the backing of a band, it can truly add to your sound and performance.

And it’s pretty easy to do! Starting from the C chord, just move your middle finger from the second fret of the D string to the second fret of the A string to get the B note. Then totally lift your finger off (which you’ll be doing to change to the G chord anyway! Very sneaky!) to get the note of the open A string.

Going from G to D requires even less work. Simply free up the open A string by slightly raising whatever finger you have there to fret the B note at the second fret. After you strike the A string, hammer the finger back down again. Then hit the open D to start the next measure.

A lot of people ask me what the difference is between a beginner and an intermediate and there’s no one good answer for that. But I think that part of it is going from a stage of simply making a chord change to making a chord change sound more interesting. And this is a great way to start doing that!

And just for those of you who like to work at this type of thing, I’ve thrown in an alternate way of going from the C to the F to the D in the last line which also makes use of this sort of bass line. I didn’t make an MP3 of it because I thought that those of you brave enough to take a stab at it will know whether or not you made it!

Believe it or not, that’s just about the whole song! The “intro” part (naturally) starts us out. We play it twice through as an instrumental and then twice more with the “Old man look at my life, I’m a lot like you were” lyric. Then we play through the verse chords once as an instrumental and then repeat them twice more with the lyrics. After that we come to the chorus. Which, coincidentally, is the missing piece of our puzzle.

The chorus also gets the “once through as instrumental” treatment that the other two sections have received. On the original recording, this is where the banjo got a moment to shine through the mix. But, as the man on the MP3 says (and I’m soooo tempted to say something like “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…” in my best Wizard of Oz impression) (trust me – it’s not pretty!), “We don’t have a banjo, so we’re just going to have to fend for ourselves!” Shall we?

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Okay, so it’s a pretty tame banjo! Russ Sprouse, I’m certainly not! The main thing I want to do here is to break up the full strumming I’ve been doing in the verses with a little arpeggio work. It’s just a change of pace, or of dynamics, whatever you’d like to call it. The point is to give the song some living, breathing room. You’ve probably heard me mention this in other lessons, but it’s important to remember that a song should be organic. Definitely so here in the chorus.

Kudos to those of you astute enough to see (and/or hear) that this measure of D arpeggios incorporates the D, Dsus4, D, Dsus2, D routine we’ve been using like fiends throughout the song. By the way, if you’re wondering just what makes a chord a “sus” (short for “suspended”), take a moment to check out an old column of mine, Building Additions (and Suspensions).

A tip of the hat as well to those who hear (and/or see) that we’re using most of our C to G to D bass line from the verse in the “pre-chorus” section. In the “prelude” to the chorus, as well as later in the chorus itself, I’ve also switched to a different voicing of both the C and G chords. This is primarily for getting the melody line in my head, as you’ll see in a moment. The C is a normal C chord, but we add our pinky to the third fret of the high E (first) string to make the G note the leading tone of the chord. On the G, we add the D note, which is at the third fret of the B string. Usually I’ll play this with my pinky on the third fret of the first string (that way I don’t have to move it!), my ring finger on the third fret of the B, my index finger on the second fret of the A and my middle finger on the third fret of the low E (sixth) string.

As I mentioned, this isn’t the most imaginative instrumental break ever. So you should feel free to tinker with it. Make it more complex, make it simpler. Have some fun playing around with it.

The rest of the chorus I play mostly straight strumming, with a few partial chords (and the occasional single note) thrown in here and there. Again, the D measure should look pretty familiar by now even though this is yet another different way of playing it. Sometimes that’s what rhythm is all about!

The C and G measure, though, is a bit tricky in terms of timing. Here I use full chords and try to follow the song’s melody (we’re on the “…lot like you…” section), which is slightly ahead of the beat. You might remember this phenomenon, from our past lessons, being called “anticipation.” I start out with the C chord (G note on the high E (first) string); this is on the word “lot.” When I get to “like,” I shift my ring finger from the third fret of the A string to the second fret of the high E (first) string. This is what the melody of the song is doing. You can simply play two C chords in a row if you prefer.

By the way, and this is purely just to be a pain, you could call this chord D9add4/A. I prefer to think of it as a passing tone and leave it at that!

Finally, on “you,” I play the G chord with the D note on the B string. Take care to avoid playing the first (high E) string no your initial strum – make that D note the last note of the chord. If you do this, you’ll be able to clearly hear the melody line If you’re like me and your singing voice needs all the help it can get, then you’ll find playing the chorus like this to be a big help to you.

After nailing that D note of the G chord in the melody, feel free to strum merrily away on that same G chord. You can hear that’s what I did.

You’ll note on the last MP3 I went through the whole chorus, back to the “intro” section and then finished off with a run through the verse’s chord progression. That’s pretty much how Old Man finishes up. On that final D chord, I like to play it with my thumb grabbing the F# note on the second fret of the low E (sixth) string. So the fingering would be like this: 200232. There’s no real reason for this; I simply like the way it sounds.

Well, then, let’s put all the pieces together. Again, I make no claims that I’ve got all the words correct!

I hope you had fun with this lesson. To me, when I was starting out, just learning the intro was a revelation because it led me to experiment with different chord voicings which, in all probability, ended up making me a better guitarist in the long run.

Remember to play around with this once you’ve got the basics of the song down. Old Man¸ like most of Neil Young’s songs, can be played in so many different ways and yet you’ll still have the heart of the song shining through. I think that’s what Neil would like.

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Maybe it’s because of my background, or maybe it’s simply just me, but I never think of songs as “guitar songs” or “piano songs” or whatever. A good song is a good song and with a little effort and imagination, you can often come up with ways of playing any song you like on your instrument of choice. Granted, playing something like Classical Gas on, say, the saxophone, won’t sound anything at all like the original recording. But we’re over that by this stage of our studies here at Guitar Noise, right?

Well, if not, let’s try to get that particular stigma out of our system once and for all. Today we’re going to learn the classic Carole King song, It’s Too Late, from her incredible 1971 album, Tapestry. Let’s dispense with the usual formalities, shall we?

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

In addition to working out a great guitar arrangement, I’d like you to also use this lesson as an introduction to the many nuances of the seventh chord. We’ll be seeing almost every type there is in this song, so do yourself a favor and listen to what you’re playing.

That may seem like an incredibly silly thing to say, but listening is an important part of developing as both a guitarist and a musician. You want to listen to everything, not just your playing but the playing of others, whether they are guitarists or bassoon players. You’ll be amazed at the little things you can pick up by keeping your ears (and mind) open!

Take our lesson today, for instance. Mention Carol King and the piano is probably the first thing that springs to mind. However, you’re probably aware of incredibly popular versions of her songs that have little to no piano in their arrangements. Who doesn’t become mesmerized listening to James Taylor’s version of You’ve Got A Friend, just to pick an example?

The piano, much like the guitar, is an instrument that plays many roles. It can pound out chords or weave together haunting arpeggios. It can lay down a song’s signature riff or hook so loudly you can’t ignore it or it can simply hide in the background, occasionally popping up with a stunningly beautiful and simply fill.

Our Easy Songs for Beginners Lessons (as well as our Songs for Intermediates) have concentrated on the single guitar, so we want to keep that in mind as we think of the best way to approach our arrangement. In this lesson we’ll focus on more of a straight chord style with riffs and rhythms holding the piece together.

And, believe it or not, it’s one simple riff that holds this whole song together. Let’s take a look at it:

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Playing this on the lowest two strings of the guitar and allowing that A string to ring out, you can hear how close this sounds to the piano already! The key is to make this as smooth as possible. As you hear in the MP3, I advise that you don’t even pick the low E (sixth) string after the first strike. Hammer your finger (I usually use my ring finger for this and I’ll explain why in a little bit…) onto the third fret of that string and then pull of to get the note of the low E for the final tone in this phrase.

Since this is one of the two “signature” hooks of this song, take the time to get it right before moving ahead. I’m sure you’re probably tired of me telling you this time after time, but hey! if it’s working, why mess with it?

When you’re happy with your playing of this riff, we’ll move on to adding it to the verse. The first two lines of the verse also serve as the introduction, by the way, so this is another bit that we want to get down well:

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I think we should take some time to talk about chord selection. And I do mean “selection.” When you look at a TAB on the internet, you won’t always find the exact chords or the chord voicing that was used in the original recording. For instance, if in our lesson on Wish You Were Here, I simply wrote out the first two chords as Em7 and G, would you automatically assume that you should make certain you’ve got the G note (third fret on the high E (first) string) and the D note (third fret on the B string) covered? Perhaps some of you might, but I suspect that you’d play the open position chords you recognize and then wonder why it didn’t sound the same.

The same lack of detail can occur in sheet music as well, especially when it comes to older songs and non-guitar oriented music. While unpacking a box, I found a friend’s copy of the sheet music for the entire Tapestry album and I was surprised to find that their version of It’s Too Late had no seventh chords in it at all! The opening two chords are Em and A. And you certainly can play it that way…

But it’s rare to hear a pianist using basic major and minor chords. The piano lends itself nicely to all sorts of interesting voicings. Your only limit is how far you can stretch your hand! Also, nice compact chords can create an interesting, and fairly far from unpleasant dissonance.

So we’re going to use a liberal dash of seventh chords in our arrangement and as we progress further through the song, I think you’ll agree that this is a good choice. Does it always work? No, most certainly not. This, like many other things we’ve covered, is a matter of experimentation as well as personal taste. But if you don’t take the time to listen to all the ways you can play something, you’ll never know what options are open to you.

Here I’ve chosen these particular voicings of the Em7 (022030) and A7 (002020) because I like the way the D (third fret of the B string) and the E note of the open first string start out fairly dissonant and then resolve to the C# (second fret of the B) and open E at the A7 chord.

Playing these chords, I use primarily my index and middle fingers. On the Em7 my pinky is on the B string, my middle finger is on the D string and my index finger frets the A string. When I switch to the A7, I simply shift my index finger up from the A string to the D and my middle finger from the D to the B. This leaves my ring finger free to do the hammer-on the low E string for the main riff. Sneaky, no?

The rhythm of this song is a hook as well. The use of the anticipation (coming in on the last half-beat of the measure) when changing from the Em7 to the A7 creates a sense of urgency.

You see that I’ve notated the strokes I use in this MP3. “D” stands for “downstroke” and “U” denotes an upstroke. The “D(P)” indicates a percussive stroke done on a downstroke. I add these for two reasons – first, to provide a nice sharp contrast to the ringing notes from the open strings. Your thinking here should be that you’re using the percussive stroke to create a rest – a distinct, marked space between chords.

Second (and even more important), by doing so, I provide the listener with the same sort of aural quality the piano has by use of its sustain pedal. By not letting some of the tones ring over from chord to chord we create a rhythmic pattern not just by strumming, but also by playing and not playing. This also allows us to give some dynamics to the rhythm. You’ll notice that sometimes I nail the percussive stroke hard and the following chord harder. Sometimes it’s more of a whisper. If I let the chord run on continuously, this nuance would be lost.

This use of a rhythmic hook (as opposed to a riff made out of notes) is best exemplified in the third line of the verse:

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I guarantee you that if you were to play just those last two measures of Cmaj7 to someone as old as I am, they’ll say “I know that song!” and start singing the chorus!

Here again I use the percussive stroke as a way to accentuate the rhythm rather than simply letting one chord run on into another. Again (and always) take your time working on this; it’s a technique that you’ll find yourself using time and time again.

And I’d also like to point out that I like using this particular voicing of the Cmaj7 (332000) because you can play all six strings of the guitar and give the chord a good full-bodied sound.

Okay, we’ve gotten through the intro and the verse! We’ve just got the chorus to go:

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And there’s almost nothing to this, right? We play a measure of Fmaj7 followed by one of Cmaj7 and repeat that progression a total of three times. Next comes a measure with two quarter notes of Am and two quarter notes of Em. We wrap the whole thing up with an arpeggio of the B7 chord and go right back into the main verse/intro chords of Em7 and A7. Piece of cake!

Two small things to point out: I know that a number of TABS use a Bm7 (which you could play (X20202) very easily) instead of the B7. Personally, and this is just a matter of personal taste, I prefer the B7. That choice is up to you.

The other thing is another fingering detail. If you play the Am as most people do, your index finger is on the first fret of the B string, your ring finger is fretting the second fret of the G string and your middle finger is playing the second fret of the D. When you switch to the Em, try not to use your index finger. Just move the other two fingers to the next lower string; your ring finger will be on the second fret of the D string and your middle finger should be on the second fret of the A string.

The reason for this is that many people have problems with the B7. I’m not really sure why; it’s just one of those chords, I guess. But if you’re fingering the Em as I described, then to go from there to the B7 simply requires you to move the ring finger back to the second fret of the G string. You can now slip your index finger nicely onto the first fret of the D string and then (only after you’ve done all that!) place your pinky on the second fret of the high E (first) string. Practice this shift a few times and you’ll probably wonder why you ever let that B7 chord bother you in the first place!

Alrighty, then. The song goes verse, chorus, second verse, chorus, third verse and final chorus. Naturally the final chorus is different from the first two in that it has an “outro” attached to it.

But since we’ve had it pretty easy in the first two choruses, I’d like to give you a few little extras that you might want to toss in if you feel you’re up to it. You can here them all on the final MP3, but let’s look at them individually first, starting with the second line:

What I’d like to do to give this final chorus a little more pizzazz is to simply use some partial chords to follow along with the melody line. Here, we start our Fmaj7 chord with an open B string and then hammer-on C note at the second fret. That’s certainly not too hard. The main thing is to try to follow along with the rhythm of the song.

We do the same thing on the third line of the chorus (“…,something inside has died…”), but now we’re upping the ante by adding a few more notes:

You should be keen to notice that I use a different voicing and fingering for this Fmaj7. I want my pinky to be free to fret the D note (third fret on the B string), so it makes sense that I don’t want to pull my pinky off of the Fmaj7 chord shape to do this. That would completely disrupt the proceedings. Instead, I make a “three fingered” voicing of the chord – index finger on the first fret of the B (after I hammer it on), middle finger on the second fret of the G and ring finger on the third fret of the D. This leaves my pinky free to get the D note and then, when I take it back off, my index finger gets the final note in that measure.

For the second measure of this line in the chorus, I play the Cmaj7, formed as I have the entire song, only I make certain to stop my strum at certain strings in order to get the notes of the melody. The first strum (and the percussive stroke) are downstrokes across all six strings, but the next upstroke I start on the B string and then my final two strokes (first up and then down) I make sure to start and then end at the G string.

This sort of thing is good to practice because it helps you get better at strumming partial chords. As we’ve seen in a number of our lessons, you don’t always want to strum every string.

Now let’s look at what would normally be the final line of the chorus:

Starting with the Am chord (downstroke), I then pull-off my index finger to get the note of the open B string. I then pick only the G string, again a downstroke, which gives us the A note since my finger is still on the second fret. I then hit the open low E (sixth) string with an upstroke, play two partial chords of Em and then switch to a D chord instead of the arpeggio of the B7, as we’ve played the first two times.

From there we’re simply going to play a Gmaj7 chord and then the Cmaj7 chord to close out the song. For the Gmaj7, I use my middle finger on the low E, my index on the A and my ring finger on the high E. There are numerous ways to play this, but I find this fingering the most comfortable for me.

Now let’s go through the entire final chorus and outro:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

And that’s the whole song! Let me post it out for you in its entirety:

I hope you had fun with this lesson and have fun playing this great song. Just as important, I hope that when you hear a song that’s mostly (or all) piano, you don’t think of it as a song you can’t play! Arranging songs is simply a matter of your imagination. As you develop more and more as a guitarist, your belief in your abilities will allow you to see more and more possibilities in songs. Not every song will turn out as wonderfully as you will hope, but more often than not, they will.

If you found this fun and would like a bit of a challenge, then check out the next “Songs for Intermediates” lesson, which will be on Elton John’s Your Song, a piano piece if there ever was one, right?

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Why? Those of you who actually read these lessons instead of skipping ahead to the notation/TAB charts and MP3s are already gearing up for a lecture. “Here he goes again!” you’re probably muttering under your breath (as if I was there to notice!).

Yes, this is an old point, but when better to bring it up (yet) again than here in our twenty-fifth “Easy Songs for Beginners” lesson. And particularly when it concerns today’s song, Wish You Were Here, from the Pink Floyd album of the same name.

You see, I have to tell you that as much as I love this song (and play it a lot!) I’ve got a lot of reservations about using it as a lesson. Why? Because to many people, this falls into what I call “sacred” music. Don’t laugh! I know you know what I’m talking about. For each of you that eagerly learns this there will be someone who will right and say, “David, you’re totally wrong about the strumming on the second beat in measure eighteen” or “I know for a fact that David Gilmour hits the G and B strings on this chord where your TAB indicates strumming all six strings.”

So let’s all get on the same page here and remember that this applies to all of the lessons on this page – we call them “lessons” because they are lessons. These are not meant to be taken as note for note transcriptions and if you’re thinking that way then you’re missing the whole point of why I’ve written this. While we will be using Wish You Were Here as our focal point today, the fact is that you will find material in this lesson that will help you play any song.

And lest you think that this is just one of my typical rants, let’s move on so you can see that sometimes I’m even cleverer than I pretend to be!

Structurally, Wish You Were Here can be broken down into two parts: the intro and the verse. The song starts with a single guitar strumming the intro. This is then repeated while a second guitar joins in playing that now famous little lead (which is easier than you think! – but more on that at the end of the lesson…). The vocals signal the start of the first verse, which is immediately followed by the second verse. We then have an instrumental (dobro and scat vocal) played over the intro. The final verse comes next and then the whole thing fades out over repeated playing of the intro.

There are no hard chords in the song; in fact, you’ve run into all of them at one point in these beginners lessons. What throws people on this song is the strumming. Why? Because people want a single discernable pattern that they can copy throughout the song. But the fact of the matter is that this is not what strumming is about. As I’ve mentioned in many lessons (and in a lot of columns), music is a living, breathing thing. What makes playing organic is allowing yourself to not get so locked into any one pattern that your strumming becomes machine-like. So how do we go about doing that?

What we’re going to do is to start with a basic strumming pattern. Let’s take a moment and get it into our heads.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This rhythmic pattern will, should you so choose, work absolutely fine throughout the whole song – both the intro part and the verses. But what I’d like to do right now is to take a quick moment which will (hopefully) change your whole concept of strumming.

Let’s go back to the G chord we just used to learn the basic strumming pattern. Chances are when you look at a TAB or at a combination of notation and TAB, this is what you’re going to see:

Most people’s first inclination is to make absolutely certain that they get every stroke of each string correct. But I’d like to tell you that this shouldn’t be your biggest concern. Here’s why:

1. What this notation/TAB shows you is that the guitarist is doing partial chord strumming. A “partial chord,” as you might recall from some of our Neil Young lessons (among others) is just two or three notes of the chord instead of the whole thing. Look at the notes (or numbers on the TAB staff) and you will see in our example that this particular pattern uses the G chord. There’s no reason to change your finger position while you play this.
2. Whether you want to believe this or not, strumming patterns like this are often both individual and arbitrary. David Gilmour did not, I guarantee you, stop and say, “Damn! I meant to hit only the B string that time and not the G and B together!” You can play this a hundred times and half of the time you will play it differently.
3. Because the strumming pattern consists of partial chords, it’s not going to make all that huge of a difference which strings you hit. The important thing is to keep the rhythm going. No one is going to point at you and screech like a pod person. Okay, someone might, but only someone who is obviously much in need of a real life!

Think about this. When you’re strumming a chord, your guitar strings are constantly ringing (unless you’re muting them, but that’s another story!). So if you hit, say, only the B string instead of the G and B together, the chances are that the G string is still ringing from the last time you struck it. As you strum a pattern, you’re not introducing a foreign note to your chord; you are simply stressing various notes within the chord. Strumming should become less a matter of what is “correct” and more of a matter of what is both appropriate and pleasing.

Think about this. Your arm, when strumming, is constantly going up and down. Even though we want to be as consistent as possible, rhythmically speaking, the fact is that we are not machines and sometimes “miss” a beat by the merest fraction of a second. Occasionally you may brush the strings lightly, almost without meaning to. You may strike the odd individual note. Don’t think this is a bad thing! In reality this makes your strumming sound more human. Organic, if you will. Or less like a machine or something that’s been sampled.

Think about this. Everyone has different strumming strokes. It may be very unnatural for you, presently, to hit certain strings in a particular order or combination. As you learn more and more about the guitar and strumming, you will develop more and more control over just what strings you want to hit. You may not believe me know, but there will come a day when it is almost totally automatic. That is what is called playing naturally. And how can you play naturally if you are trying to copy someone else’s natural stroke note by note? It’s not going to happen.

So let’s use this lesson as a way to get comfortable with playing our own style. I’m more than happy to help! Through out the lesson, you’ll find that I will give you specific notes that you’ll need (primarily for the introduction), but I’m going to let each of you, no pun intended, pick and choose which strings to strum. So, instead of seeing something like I wrote up for “Example 2A,” you’ll see something like this:

The little slash notation means to use a partial chord stroke. You’ll also note I’ve been kind enough in these examples to indicate both down and up strokes. Anything to be of assistance!

Are you ready to move on to the introduction now? We use these three chords in the intro:

If you’ve recently read our lesson on Hurt, you’ll undoubtedly recognize what’s going on here is the use of sustained tones, that is, notes shared in these particular voicings of these particular chords. Before we even get into playing the actual intro, take a moment to get comfortable with these fingerings. Switch from G to Em7 and back again. Do the same with the Em7 and the A7sus4. And then finally switch between the A7sus4 and the G. You may think it silly to do this, but taking a moment to get your fingering clear in your head (and in your hands!) is important and will make the work we’re about to do go much easier.

Once you’re comfortable with these chord changes, form the G chord and follow along:

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You should hear right from the start that this is definitely not the original recording. But it is, strangely enough, still instantly recognizable as Wish You Were Here. Amazing, isn’t it? Those of you who want to sit here and debate which is “better,” by all means, please do so. In the meantime, I’ll discuss with the others what exactly we’re doing.

Essentially, we’re concerned about two things here – keeping the rhythm going and still managing to get those little fills into the mix. The best way to do both of these tasks is to keep the chord shape intact as long as possible. This is why I start with the G note of the G chord even though the original recording starts on the A note. With my fingers in position, the notes of the fill are, again pardon the pun, all right within my grasp.

For the little G to Em7 fill, I strike the G note, and then, removing my finger from the second fret of the A string, pick the open A and immediately hammer my finger back on to the fret it just vacated.

It’s important to note here that you want to perform this hammer-on with whichever finger you plan to use to play this note on the Em7 chord (this is why I had you practice your switching!). As you saw in the chord chart, I use my index finger for the same string and fret on both the G and Em7. Now I’m ready to finish this fill off by striking the open D string and then hammering my middle finger onto the second fret. I’m now ready to do some partial chord strumming of the Em7 to fill up the rest of the measure. I like to pluck the low E string for an added emphasis, but that’s just me. No, that’s not on the original recording either. Sigh…

When I go from the Em7 to the G, I do a simple two-note fill (which is on the recording!) – picking the E note (second fret, D string) and then the open D string. Now, after hitting the low G note on the third fret of the sixth string, I’m ready to do some partial chord strumming on the G chord. And that, believe it or not, is half of the work of the introduction. Take some time and play this over and over and over until you’re totally comfortable (comfortably numb?) with it or until someone comes by and pays you to learn the next part of the song.

And the next part of the song is moving from the Em7 to the A7sus4. And again, because we’ve taken the time to work on our fingering, you should find this very easy going:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Here we go from strumming the Em7 to playing a run of four notes which will end on A, the root of our A7sus4. I think that it’s important to play these (like the E to D when going from Em7 back to G) as individually struck notes as opposed to pick-offs. You want to hear each one clearly and cleanly played. Now I should point out here that I like to switch from A7sus4 (x02233) to A7 (x02223). Why? Because I like the motion it gives the overall sound. I also have this habit of giving the low E string a little tweak on the third fret before going back to the Em7. Again, this is simply a stylistic quirk which adds a little more dynamics to the proceedings.

Again, take time to practice this section of the introduction. Go from Em7 to A7sus4, back to Em7, back to A7sus4 and then finish with a bit of a flourish on the G. Now try putting the two parts of the intro together. It will (hopefully) sound something like this:

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Now we can move on to the verse. And the verse is just simple chord strumming! Each chord is held for one measure (four beats) and follows this pattern, which I’m going to do for you in this example using the basic strum:

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Nothing to it, right? You’re all getting too good! One thing to remember from some of our past lessons is that you can use the upstroke immediately preceding the chord change as a place to change your chord. Since you’ve all gotten good at partial chord strumming, you’ll find that even if you don’t have any fingers on the fretboard at all, it’s going to sound fine.

And for those of you who’d like a bit more of a challenge, then I offer you this:

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Here we have a simple walking bass line to use when changing from C to Am in the verses. You can perform it, as you see, in many ways – straight notes, notes and chord combo or as an arpeggio. The choice is always, and as it should be, yours to make.

So let’s leave you with a final transcription and a final MP3 containing a verse strummed more “freely” than in the last example (which should give you even more understanding as to why I took the whole first part of this lesson to stress this point!), followed by the intro section. If you listen closely to this MP3, you’ll hear that I use my “basic” strum as a template. I’m never far from it but I’m not always spot on. And I think you’ll agree that it sounds even better than the first version of the verse I played.

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I hope you had fun with this lesson and have fun playing this song. More importantly (and I know I’ve used these exact words before), I hope that you begin to get a feel that, ultimately, strumming patterns are up to you. You can use full chords, partial chords, single notes and arpeggios – singly or in any combination you desire. Play around with songs you already know. Come up with different ways of playing them. As we move on with more and more songs, you’re going to want to be able to shift from one style to another. So take the time now to gain some confidence in your abilities.

It’s often very important to not be totally locked into any particular strumming pattern. More often than not, you will want your music to breathe and move naturally. So, yes, I’ve given you yet another paradox – you have to hold the rhythm steady and at the same time give the rhythm space to be free. This isn’t an easy concept to explain, let alone put into practice! But I think that, since most of you are very familiar with this song, you should have a good grasp of what we’ve been discussing.

Hopefully you will also find that none of this was hard once you put your mind and fingers to it! If that’s so, then I do want to invite you to take a look at the next upcoming “Songs for Intermediates” lesson, which will be, no lie, Wish You Were Here! What’s up with that? Well, that lesson will deal with playing the second guitar part of the introduction, as well as expand on various fills and things that you can use during the verse. We’ll also take a quick look at playing the whole introduction with only one guitar.

Hope to see you there.

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

While he will be well remembered as both performer and songwriter, Mr. Cash also had a gift for knowing great songs and a tremendous talent to tailor those songs to his unique abilities. A song’s genre wasn’t as important to him as its emotional impact. On his last studio album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, he covered artists as diverse as Paul Simon and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. And today, we’ll be taking a look at his arrangement of Reznor’s haunting song Hurt and making our own adaptation for the single guitar.

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

In terms of structure, Hurt is your basic verse, chorus, verse, chorus song with a short extension of the chorus tacked on to the end. The verses consist of two measures, which are repeated almost like a loop. Here is our chord progression for the verses:

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As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, we’re going to concentrate on the atmosphere of this song – making it intense by keeping things sparse. The pattern of the verse keeps things simple. We start by fingering an Am chord and then playing just the open A string followed by the E note (second fret of the D string) follow by a downstroke of the remaining strings of the chord, which we’ll let ring through the end of this measure. In order to let all these chords ring as long as possible, keep your fingers in their position until you’re ready to move on to the next one. Speaking of which…

The second measure repeats this rhythmic motif of two eighth notes followed by a chord. But our chords (C and Dsus2) are now only a quarter note in length. We want to fit both of these chords in one bar after all! The Dsus2, by the way, I’ve seen called other things on various TABs throughout the internet. We’ll stick with this label if you don’t mind. In case you need a refresher, “sus” means “suspended.” We’ve replace the third of the chord (which would be F# in a D major chord and F in a D minor chord) with the second, which is E. You can read more about these chords (and others) in the column “Building Additions (and Suspensions).”

This is a fairly dissonant chord, as you can hear. When we finally begin the Am chord again, it’s almost an audible sigh of relief even though the song’s overall tone is still one of sadness. And that’s precisely what we’re looking for – a sort of resignation that things are messed up beyond all control and there’s not a lot, if anything, one can do about it.

At the final line of the verses, we end with the G chord instead of the Am. This signals the beginning of the chorus. If you’re familiar with Cash’s version (or if you’ve seen the video, which I think won an MTV award), you know that the chorus, while still sparse, is nonetheless moving and urgent. Part of this is owing to his pounding on the G note on the piano over and over again, almost like driving a nail through a board.

What I have tried to do in our arrangement of this song is to combine the guitar and piano parts. We can do this by keeping the G on the high E (first) string throughout each chord change. This use of a sustained tone creates a lot of tension and release (and you can read more about them here in Sustained Tones: An Animated Discussion). Let’s take a look and have a listen to our chorus:

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As you can see in the chord chart and on the TAB, we’re going to use a slightly different voicing of our G chord, one that adds the D note on the third fret of the B string. I find the best way to finger this is using your pinky (the smallest finger) on the first string, your ring finger on the B, your index finger on the A (fifth) string and then finally your middle finger on the low E (sixth) string. I have to warn you that your pinky is in for a workout!

On the strumming, I think you’re going to find this the easiest thing we’ve done yet! I use three straight quarter notes done as downstrokes followed by two eighth notes on the fourth beat. This is a quick down-and-up stroke and you’ll see that I’ve marked the final eighth note (the upstroke) with “x’s” as if it’s a palm mute. When you listen to the MP3, you can hear that it’s not quite a palm mute and yet it’s definitely not a chord. What’s going on? This is where I’m changing my chords! Depending on the chord, and how I’m doing the change, I may get a few of the notes or I may get more of that palm muted sound, but I’m almost always going to get that G note. Pretty sneaky, no? Taking this much time on the change will also assure that I have my next chord in place for the upcoming measure.

Keep your pinky and ring finger in place while changing from the G to A7sus4 and cover the notes on the second fret (on the G and D strings) with either both of the other fingers or with one finger barred across the first four strings. I’ve seen some TABs with a straight A7 (X02223) but I prefer using the D note (the “sus4″ part of the chord) to create more dissonance.

To go from the A7sus4 to the Fadd9, just move your ring finger down to the third fret of the D string and place your index finger one the first fret of the B string and your middle finger on the second fret of the G string. Then congratulate yourself. You’ve done the hardest part of the song! Changing from Fadd9 to this particular voicing of C requires you to merely move your ring and middle fingers down a string. The middle finger stays on the second fret while slipping from the G string to the D and the ring finger goes from the D string to the A. Then all you’ve got to do is get back to your original G and you’re reading to recycle the progression.

As I mention in the MP3, dynamics are important to this song and particularly in the chorus. Because the verses are so quiet and sparse, it’s easy to succumb to the temptation of wailing away on the chorus from the get-go. But if you start out at full volume, you’ll find you have nowhere to go!

This is where our arrangement can help you out. By keeping things sparse you can gradually increase the force of your downstrokes, building the tone into more of a frenzy with each measure.

By the time we’ve reached the final line of the chorus, you should feel like you can’t keep from exploding. And that’s just when, of course, we abruptly downshift back into the verse. Fortunately we go from the C to the Am, so it doesn’t take a lot of finger motion. Also remember that we’re going to start with two single notes (open A and E on the second fret of the D, which is already in place and how’s that for planning!) so you’ve got plenty of time to gather yourself together again:

The second time through the chorus is slightly different. The A7sus4, Fadd9, C and G progression is extended through an additional two lines. But because you haven’t begun the chorus with your volume at “eleven,” you’ve still got enough headroom to make this all very dramatic. Even more so when you just hold the final C chord and simply sing the last line while that chord trails off:

And that’s the song, folks. Let me write it all out for you here:

I hope you had fun with this lesson and have fun with this song. If you take anything away from all of this, I hope that it’s a sense of the importance of dynamics and how you can achieve a lot by keeping things simple. Think of each song you do as a little performance within a bigger one. Using a little thought in how you present each song can make you a more interesting performer. After all, you may not have a huge light and laser show to cart around with you! Let the songs work for you instead of going through the motions.

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Until next lesson…

Peace

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Wild World,our song for today, is (yet) another old song from the early seventies. It was written by Cat Stevens and I like to teach it to my students after they’ve had a little Neil Young for reasons I think you’ll discover yourself during this lesson.

Taking a quick glance at the chords, a beginner might feel a bit of anxiety. Here’s the first verse and chorus:

Now that’s a lot of changes, isn’t it? But take heart! We’ll get through this with a little bit of thought and have a lot of fun with it.

First, though, let’s take a look at the rhythm. I know I shouldn’t have to say this, but it can’t hurt to iterate that this may not be precisely the same strumming pattern that is on the recording. I don’t own the record (gasp!) and I haven’t heard the original version of this for (I think) close to twenty years.

But it’s a good pattern. As I mentioned earlier, it has the same style of many Neil Young songs, not to mention scores of other guitarists. We’re going to play this at a very deliberate pace, say 100 BPM. And remember that you can work up to that speed! Start at 80 BPM if it’s more comfortable. After all, this isn’t a competition! To make strumming matters easier, let’s start out with just the Am and not worry just yet about changing the chords. Have a listen:

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At this tempo, you shouldn’t be afraid of sixteenth notes! On the first beat, we play two eighth notes. In today’s notation, I’ve used “x”s to let you have a choice on what to do. You can play the single bass note (the open A string on this example), or a partial chord (I usually do this striking the A and D strings) or even play the whole Am. This is totally up to you. As you can hear, I like to palm mute these and play them both as downstrokes. On the sixteenth notes, I alternate my strumming – down and up, down and up.

I’ve taken the liberty of throwing in a second strumming pattern (rhythm pattern #2), which is a little sparser than the first. They start out the same – with the two eighth note downstrokes on the first beat – but the second beat of this alternate pattern consists of breaking the second beat into a dotted eighth note (a downstroke) followed by a sixteenth (an upstroke). When I’m playing this song, I find myself alternating a lot between these two patterns. While the first one fills up more space, the second is a little easier to sing along with.

As in every lesson we’ve done, take your time getting comfortable with these rhythm patterns. After all, you’re going to be playing them pretty much throughout the song! I think that getting it right at this point will make your life a lot easier. Practice one, then the other and then try mixing them up a bit and see how you like it.

Alright, then, are you ready to work on the first verse? Before we start I want you to know something important about changing chords that you have probably already figured out: the less you have to move your fingers, the better! Most guitarists, regardless of experience, tend to think of chords as single entities. But music is a flowing thing and getting it into your head that chords should flow one into another will help you make smoother transitions. That’s what today is all about. I want to show you how you can actually get away with a lot when you’re changing chords. And (big surprise here!), also how knowing a little bit about theory can make things easier on you.

Let’s start with the first half of the first verse. Two things about the notation – first, the “x,” as I previously said, indicates to palm mute your choice of bass note, partial chord or full chord. Second, in order to make things slightly easier on myself, I wrote most of this out using “rhythm pattern #2,” but in the MP3 you’ll hear me playing a combination of both strumming patterns. Don’t freak out about it, okay?

You see that we’ve only four measures, and there are two chord changes in each. You’ve probably also noticed that I’ve changed a few of the chords! Is that cheating? Not really. The chords we’re using as substitutes are not very different than the originals and, as you will hear in just a bit, sound perfectly fine. My reason for using these chords, believe it or not, is to give you less to think about!

Typically, one plays the Am chord with the index finger on the first fret of the B string, the ring finger on the second fret of the G string and the middle finger on the second fret of the D string. To switch from the Am to D7, we simply scoot our ring finger to the high E (first) string and shift the middle finger to the spot where our ring finger was. The index finger stays put. Remember, the first beat of the new chord can simply be the open D string, and playing those two eighth notes that way leaves you plenty of time to get the rest of the chord set up for the sixteenth notes that follow! Devious, isn’t it?

Going from D7 to G will involve moving all three fingers, but surprisingly we aren’t going to change their shape all that much. What do I mean by “shape?” Well, if for the G chord I use my middle finger for the third fret of the low E (sixth) string and my index finger to play the second fret of the A string, they will still be in the same position, relative to each other, as they are when playing the D7. Do you see this? Even though I’m actually moving two fingers, I can trick my body into thinking it’s a single motion. Thinking about moving my fingers n this fashion makes it easier for me and less work for my hands. Having covered the fifth and sixth strings, all I have to do now is slide my ring finger up a fret so that it covers the G note at the third fret of the high E.

Next we go from G to C, which I’ve changed to a Cmaj7. The Cmaj7 is simply your standard C chord, but with an open B string. The easiest way to make this change is to move your index and middle fingers up a string. There we are using that “shape” thing again! But, looking ahead at the next chord, I’m not certain that I want to do this. Going from this fingering of Cmaj7 to Fmaj7 is going to be a chore. So instead, I totally remove my index finger from the fretboard, use my ring finger on the second fret of the D string and, since my ring finger is already on the third fret, transfer it from the first string to the A string.

I’d like to note here that when I’m changing chords, I try to plant the fingers on the lowest strings first, because I want that bass. It also makes sense to do so because, more often than not, you’re going to be playing a downstroke on the new chord.

Another reason for playing a Cmaj7 in this fashion (or playing it at all, for that matter!) is to give the chord a little flourish. That’s a fancy way of saying I’m going to use my free index finger to hammer-on the first fret of the B string, essentially making the Cmaj7 a regular C. Like this:

I know… I should make up my mind which chord to use! Seriously, with my fingers now set in the C chord, switching to the Fmaj7 is a piece of cake – just shift your ring and middle fingers up a string.

So far this has been a snap, no? Let’s tackle the last few changes then. For many people, Dm is a quirky chord. Usually I will finger it with my index finger on the first fret of the first (high E) string, my pinky on the third fret of the second string (some people use their ring finger

here, but I find using my pinky more comfortable) and my middle finger on the second fret of the third string. My middle finger is therefore already in position for the Dm when I’m playing the Fmaj7; it doesn’t have to move at all. Anything to make life easier!

The final chord change, from Dm to E, will require me to move all of my fingers. But because of my positioning, it won’t be that hard. Again, it’s all in the shape. My index finger is already on the first fret – it only has to move from the B string to the G. My middle finger, on the second fret of the G, moves down two strings to the A string. Since my ring finger is free, it simply follows the middle finger and parks itself on the second fret of the D string. My pinky goes back to being carefree and unused.

But not for long! Since the last measure is four counts of E, and because I’ve become used to playing two chords per measure, I add my pinky to the third fret of the B string. This makes the E an E7 and allows me a chance to do another little flourish, courtesy of a little pull-off:

You can simply play this last measure out as four beats of E if you so desire. But I think you’ll find these little touches will come to you pretty easily with a little practice.

The second half of the verse starts out with the same three measures. Then it adds a “half measure” of C (one measure in 2 / 4 time), followed by a full measure of G. I’ve come up with two ways to play this, one very easy and one slightly more difficult:

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Example #5A is fairly straightforward, although it does use a bit of the “anticipation” technique that we’ve encountered in some of our earlier lessons. The measure of G uses the both of the strumming patterns that I showed you in Example #1.

In our second example, I’ve added a short bass line to make the transition to the chorus a little more interesting. But instead of using just the single bass notes (G, F, E and D), I use full chords in order to make things a little more powerful. We start with a single hit on the G chord and then go to a pattern of sixteenth notes for Fmaj7, C/E (a C chord with E in the bass) and G7/D. You can see that the fingering for these is not all that complex. The G7/D is one finger on the first string!

I can’t stress enough the importance of trying this slowly – painfully slowly if that’s what it takes. Since you probably won’t have a piano to hide behind when you play this, keeping it clean will be important. If you’re having problems with one particular change of chords in the verse, stop and just work on that one change. Find the way that works for you. Rest assured, once you’ve got the changes down to the point where they are comfortable for you. it won’t take all that long to get your speed up.

Okay, then, so here’s the whole verse. I’ve also, conveniently enough, tacked on the introduction (which is (also conveniently enough) the first half of the verse) as well:

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Wow! Pretty cool so far, eh? Are you ready to move on to the chorus and have even more fun? As usual, there’s both good news and bad. The good news is that most of the chorus consists of our strumming pattern, which we should have down cold by now.

The bad news (“bad” meaning “fun” and “challenging”) is that we’ve got two riffs to throw in. These are played by the piano in the recording, but, as you may have already figured out, this site is called “Guitar Noise” for a reason…

Let’s take a look at the first two lines of the chorus:

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Looks like more good news! Riff #1 is simply a descending C major scale! Not only that, but it comes immediately after playing an Fmaj7 chord? You might not have any idea how simple that little chord is going to make this work out. First get your fingers set on the fretboard for Fmaj7. If you’ve forgotten, your index finger is on the first fret of the B string, your middle finger is on the second fret of the G and your ring finger is on the third fret of the D. Are you ready?

And if you think I was adamant before about the importance of starting out slowly, well… The important thing about this is to get the timing down pat; it’s a nice, even string of sixteenth notes. One’s natural tendency is to see how fast you can play it, but that’s really not the point. You want this to be a natural and flowing part of the song, not a big disruption. I tell my students that they should not play the rest of the song any faster than they can play this riff. Why? Because there is really no sense to be whizzing through a song and then bring the whole thing to a screeching halt while you stumble over a single measure. That’s not how you’d perform it, after all.

Believe it or not, once you get this down you can play

around with it. On the very last chorus, I like to clip the low C that ends the run and then not play the G until the second beat of the next measure. This gives a bit of a dramatic punch, as you can hear in the MP3 coming up.

Chorus riff #2, a cool sounding run on the lower strings, uses the same rhythm of straight sixteenth notes. Because you are on a C major chord immediately before it (as well as immediately afterwards!), try to play this all with your ring finger while holding the rest of the C chord in place. Remember yet again that it will take a little practice to get it clean and up to speed, but I think you’ll find the results will be worth it.

Finally, there’s a turnaround to get us back to the verse again. This consists simply of a single beat each of Dm and E (E resolving nicely to the Am which starts the verse). I like to play these as two sixteenth notes followed by a rest equivalent to an eighth note. More dramatics…

Let’s put the whole chorus together, shall we? In fact, let’s play one full chorus and then do the final chorus, which we’ll discuss in a moment, as well

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Now that we’ve got the parts of the song sorted out, we can put it together structurally. The intro, as previously mentioned, consists of the first four measures of the verse. Then play a whole verse, the chorus, another verse and another chorus. We go through the verse a final time; the first two lines (four measures) can be considered an instrumental (on the recording this is where the “la la la la la la la la la la’s” come in), while the last two lines are sung as before.

I like to play two choruses at the end, but that means using a different turnaround. Instead of the measure of C, Dm and E, I recommend playing two beats of C followed by two beats (I usually strum this all in sixteenth notes) of G. Then go through the whole chorus again but end with a single strum of C you reach it on the last line. Be sure to let it ring out.

It should all look like this:

I hope you had fun with this lesson and have fun with this song. The important thing to take away from this lesson is that you don’t have to shy away from songs that have a lot of chord changes. Take them apart to the point where you can work out the best way for you to make the changes and then practice those changes until you can get them up to speed. It won’t be long before you wonder what concerns you might have had in the first place!

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Until next lesson…

Peace

Em (four beats) D (two beats) Em (two beats)

Ready? We’re going to play it two ways:

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Chances are that example #1A sounded fairly generic. It could have been any song. But you ears really perked up when you played example #1B. “Hey!” you probably said, “I sound like Neil Young!” Cool, isn’t it?

Even more to the point: How hard was that to do? The strumming was pretty much all eighth notes, played with down strokes for emphasis. As for the hammer-on, well, you’re playing an Em chord immediately beforehand, right? Just take whatever finger you’re using to fret the A string, remove it, pick said A string and slam your finger back on to the second fret. Then pick the D string (where your finger should still be on the second fret). Voila! Some people like to do this by using both of their Em chord fingers. That’s perfectly fine. As you can hear, I then hit the open low E (sixth) string to start out the next measure. For me it’s just a way of keeping the tempo.

Okay, since we’ve just covered the intro (believe it or not), let’s get this out of the way before we go any further:

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

On the original recording of Heart of Gold, the intro actually consists of this part we’ve just played and then what we’re calling the “verse.” We’ll touch on this in a moment, after we’ve covered the rest of the song structure. What we’ve got is your classic verse-chorus-verse-chorus song. During the verses, each chord lasts two beats:

The chords are certainly simple enough, aren’t they? Let’s work on the rhythm of the verses. I’ve laid out three different ways of doing this, but, as always, you can and should feel free to come up with your own:

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Our first pattern, Example #2A, consists of straight chord strumming. There’s nothing fancy here, just solid rhythm. Take your time and get the rhythm into your head and hands and once you’re confident that you can do it, then move on to the next strumming examples.

Example #2B shows you something a little closer to the quintessential Neil Young strum. The first two notes are played with a bit of palm muting and then the guitar sings out the rest of the chord. There are so many ways to explain palm muting! Everyone seems to have his or her own technique. In fact, when I teach my students about palm muting most of them say, “I do that all the time when I’m goofing around.”

Let’s start out with the simplest: First, play a single note, any note. Use the C (third fret on the A string) that I play in the example if you’d like. Keep your strumming hand close to the string when you pick it. Now play it again while resting a bit of your palm lightly against the string. The idea is to get a muted version of that note. If you don’t hear a thing, you’re putting too much pressure on the string. It’s important to realize that you don’t need all that much pressure at all.

Like most things about the guitar, this is a matter of practice and experimentation. It’s a great technique to add to your playing because it can help give your guitar a very different tonal characteristic. Be sure to try it not only with single notes, but with chords and partial chords as well.

Finally, what do you say we try something like the rhythm style we used in our last lesson, Dock of the Bay. Even though I call it “straight arpeggios” on the MP3, in reality it’s a combination of arpeggios and partial chords (two or three notes). In Example #2C I start out with the bass note (here the lowest root of the chord) and then pick a few strings of the chord being played On the C chord it’s the C note, then the open G string, followed by the first two strings and then the C in the bass again. This can be very dramatic because it gives you the sound of a walking bass line by hitting the C right before going to the open D string that starts the D chord. As always, this is a suggested pattern. Feel free to come up with a few of your own.

Now let’s go back to the intro for a second. On the recorded version, the full intro actually starts with the little thing we did at the very beginning of the lesson (Example #1B) and then goes into a round of the verse and then back to Example #1B. This is where the first harmonica solo can be heard. This intro section is also played between the two verses of the song. Or, if you’re going to be nitpicky, after the first chorus and before the second verse.

Okay, shall we move on to the chorus?

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From our Em chord, we go to G and then to C. I like to accent this chord with a little flourish: going from C to Cmaj9 and then back to C. This is the same thing we did in the Love The One You’re With lesson. Play the normal C twice, then lift off your index and middle fingers, leaving your ring finger on the C note at the third fret of the A string. Then return to the normal C chord. It’s simple and effective. And it helps make up for you not having all the instrumentation of the original recording by having something more interesting than straight strumming going on.

We’re now going to play the C chord one more time and then B (second fret, A string) and A (open A string) and then hit your G chord. In the MP3 you’ll hear me do this with just the C note (single string as opposed to the full chord) the first time and then with the whole C chord (as in the transcription) on the second pass through the progression. You can also do this descending walk as full chords, going from C to C/B (X22010) to C/A (or Am7 if you prefer – either way it’s X02010). Each of these ways will work fine.

From this G chord we’re going to go back to Em (either in repeating the chorus or going back to the Intro part), so let’s take advantage of what Nick Torres calls “the world’s easiest bass run” – descending from G to Em via F#. Since we’re already on the G, we will hit the single F# note (second fret on the low E (sixth) string) to set up the Em chord that will cycle us around again.

So how about putting them all together? Here is Example #1B, followed by the verse, followed by the chorus:

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Finally, let’s play the outro. It’s all stuff we’ve already done. Start with the Em to D and back progression from Example #1B. Then we’re going to go to a G chord and then switch to C. Finally tack on the little flourish and descending C to G line from the chorus and finish it all off with a resounding G chord. Here’s how it goes:

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I hope you had fun with this lesson and have fun with this song. Remember the way you strum something can be all you need to change something from mediocre to memorable. Also remember that the simplest of touches, even a single hammer-on, can bring about as much eloquence as a difficult riff.

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next lesson…

Peace

Heart of Gold for Harmonica Players

Neil Young’s Heart of Gold is a classic guitar-harmonica song. Now that you’ve learned this song on guitar, you can learn the harmonica part. Check out the excellent free lesson over at HarmonicaLessons.com.

The truth is that it’s all up to you. If you want to copy what the guitarist on a recording does, then you just listen to what he or she is playing. If you want to come up with something yourself that will sound perfectly fine of its own accord, then you need to experiment. You have to know what different strumming styles are going to sound like. So let’s take a song and try out a few ideas.

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

I’ve chosen Otis Redding’s (Sitting on) The Dock of the Bay as our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lesson for today. It will be a bit of a challenge, I think. But I also think you’re more than up for it. After all, this is the twenty-first song, isn’t it? Time for some work! Okay, work that is both easy and fun!

First, let’s grab the chords and examine the song structure. It’s pure formula: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus. As always, my chords (and lyrics) may be different than others you’ve seen or heard. Have a peek:

In our arrangement, we’re going to make one chord substitution:

I’ve substituted B7 for B because it will be an easier chord to play and it doesn’t change the tone of the song drastically enough for someone to notice. Also, I want to stay away from barre chords at this point in our studies.

Now, let’s try playing this with a simple strum. Let me give you a pattern to use:

Nothing really to it, right? Most strumming is just a matter of a steady down-and-up stroke of the strings. In the simplest form, think of striking down on the beat and up at the off-beat (or half-beat). Get your hand going in a steady motion of down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.

But playing every single stroke would get monotonous pretty quickly. The trick to strumming, if you want to think of it as a “trick,” is in keeping your wrist, hand and arm going but NOT ALWAYS STRIKING THE STRINGS. This is how you create patterns.

What I’ve done is broken up every measure into eighth notes (two per beat, so eight per measure, since we’re in 4/4 time). We’ll keep the eighth notes steady and pick and choose which ones to play the strings on and which ones to leave empty, if you will.

Here we’re playing a downstroke on the first beat but not striking the strings as we move our hand back up. We hit them again with a downstroke on the second beat and also with an upstroke on the offbeat between the second and third beats. We miss the strings on the downstroke of the third beat and then hit them on the upstroke (in the last half of the third beat), and then both down and up on the fourth beat.

Play this pattern while holding the G chord. Once you feel comfortable with the pattern, let’s do a whole verse and a chorus:

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So, why did I choose this particular pattern for this particular song? Truth be told, I could have gone with many others. But this one has a lazy feel to it. It’s not busy, yet it keeps things moving along. In other words, it sounds good. And sometimes things are that simple.

We could play the whole song this way. There’s no reason we couldn’t, except that then the lesson would be over! And you know I couldn’t just let it go at that, right?

So let’s take what we know and add to it. Maybe we’ll even learn something!

Let’s start with an observation. There are lots of different ways to strum, if only because there are all sorts of patterns to play. But in addition to patterns that involve straight chords, you can also simply play individual notes. We touched upon this in our very first lesson, The Simplest Song. Merely adding a bass note (usually the root of the chord) can add a whole new dimension to your strumming. When you go from single notes in the bass, as in “Horse With No Name,” to simple bass lines (as in Fire) and then onto more complex riffs (Hey Hey My My), you are adding new layers of complexity to your playing. Equally important, you are developing a repertoire of patterns that you can use throughout your playing. The more you learn about music, music theory and the guitar, the more you will find yourself creating your own riffs and fills.

Shall we start with an introduction? On the recording, the bass starts out the song with a little riff (actually, just the root and fifth, or G and D notes) while we hear some recorded ocean noises. I hear waves, seagulls, and if you listen intently you might hear a crab scuttling across the sand… We don’t have a bass, so we’re going to have to do this part ourselves:

You can do this one of two ways: first, you can simply set up your fingers to play both of these notes, as I’ve pointed out in example 3A. Personally, I prefer to slide my finger up to the D note from the C. I do this with my ring finger, sliding it from the third fret to the fifth.

Now we could simply play our bass notes and strum the chords, but let’s have some real fun! The chord progression of this song lends itself very nicely to a walking chromatic bass line. We’re going to use one between the following chord changes:

Be sure to notice that we are now creating an “anticipation” by hitting our chord changes a half beat sooner with the bass note, and then following up with the full chord in the next measure. You can probably already hear how this now sounds a lot more like the recording. Some players will use the whole chord instead of just the bass note, but for right now we’ll concentrate on the single notes, okay? Practice these transitions for a little bit and, when you’re ready, join me in playing the intro, one verse and one chorus in this manner:

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We’re progressing nicely, don’t you think? Again, you could stop here and play the whole song this way. But since we’re on a roll, I want to throw in one last idea.

We started out by strumming full chords and we’ve moved on to strumming full chords with a single bass note. Now I want to strum the occasional arpeggio and mix that into our other two styles. Arpeggios, as we’ve learned in past lessons such as House of the Rising Sun, are the notes that make up the chord, played one at a time. In essence, we’re playing the individual strings that make up a chord and not all of them at once. Let’s listen to a slowed-down audio of the first verse and chorus:

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Yes, I did start out with the last half of the intro in order to set the beat. Where we previously used full chords on the G and B7, we now strum arpeggios, or single strings. The MP3 is not an exact transcript of the notation, so don’t freak out. There is more than enough material here for you to work it out. I’ll help you along.

We start out the verse with arpeggios of the G and B7 chords. While fingering these chords, I want to play certain strings in straight eighth notes in order to keep the rhythm steady. For the G, I first play the sixth string, then the third, then the second and finally the fourth. Then we do our little bass note transition that we saw earlier.

For the measure of B7, I use more of a classical-style arpeggio, which uses the A note (second fret on the G string) as a point. I want to end this measure with the B note in the bass so that I can smoothly go from B to C.

When I get to the C chord, I go back to the “bass and chord” strumming we did in the second MP3. Finally, for the A chord, I also add my pinky to the third fret of the B string, creating an Asus4, as we did at the very end of the verses in Tangled Up in Blue. I throw in the Asus2 as well, created by playing an open B string over the A chord.

Spend some time with this. As I’ve stressed numerous times in the past, go as slowly as you have to until you have it right and feel comfortable with it. Then pick up some speed. The song is of a moderate tempo, so you should be up to speed in a fairly short time.

On the chorus section, I start out with more bass and chord strumming. The only thing to watch out for is when I switch between the G and A chords. Here we do a chromatic bass line (G to G# to A) throwing in the open G string again as a pedal point. Then it’s back to that nice A/Asus4/Asus2 arpeggio we used a few measures earlier in the verse.

I cannot stress strongly enough that this notation is simply a guideline. You can (and should!) feel free to play it in any manner you choose. That’s why I deliberately made the MP3 and the notation different. I do not want you to think, “This is the way it has to be played.” You’re supposed to be having fun, remember?

Finally, let’s look at the bridge. I make the strumming pattern here a bit staccato. This creates a different feel than we’ve had during the verses, which in turn helps us to create some dynamics within the song:

On the C chord, I create a little more tension and interest by removing my middle finger from the second fret of the D string and then putting it back on again. Basically, I switch from C to Cadd9 every half beat. It’s a subtle change, but as you’ll hear in the MP3, it adds an interesting dynamic to the pattern.

I should note that instead of an F (as most TABs show), I use this fingering of the Fmaj7: 133210, with my thumb holding the first fret of the sixth string. My main reason for doing this is because it’s an easy grab from the preceding C chord. All I have to do is place my pinky on the third fret of the D and move my middle finger from the second fret of the D to the second fret of the G. I also like to grab the F note on the first fret of the sixth (low E) string with my thumb. But if you can’t do this, just be careful and strike the four inner strings. This will give you a very full sounding F chord and few will even notice that you cheated!

This final MP3 starts out with the last line of the second chorus and then goes through the bridge, the last verse and last chorus. I’ve also tacked on an abbreviated outro. On the recording, this is where the whistling comes in and the fade out comes. Doing a fade out as a solo performer seems both ludicrous and pretentious, so I prefer to give it a real ending. We’ll just make a big deal of going from G to E one last time for our grand finale. Have a listen:

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And there you have it. I hope you had fun with this lesson and have fun with this song. More important, I hope that you begin to get a feel that, ultimately, strumming patterns are up to you. You can use full chords, partial chords, single notes and arpeggios – singly or in any combination you desire. Play around with songs you already know. Come up with different ways of playing them. As we move on with more and more songs, you’re going to want to be able to shift from one style to another. So take the time now to gain some confidence in your abilities.

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Until next lesson…

Peace

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Today’s lesson is Tangled Up in Blue, from the great Bob Dylan album, Blood On The Tracks. And this brings up point number two: When I learned this off my original copy (which was an album), maybe it was my record player or maybe the recording, but I thought the song was in G, only slightly sharper. So I learned it in G. Actually, as you’ll see, we’ll play it in the key of D. But, playing along with the CD, it’s decidedly in A. This is not a big thing, unless you’re one of those people concerned about sounding exactly like the original recording. But if you are one of these people, then you’re probably not reading any of my lessons anyway, right?

I bring up the subject of keys because of what we’re going to cover next. If you listen to the original you will hear more than one guitar playing, which is always a problem when you can only play one guitar at once. Coming up with my arrangement, I opted to focus on the higher-toned guitar, which made me decide to use a capo in order to get the voicing of a D shaped-chord as the root chord.

What do I mean by that? For simplicity’s sake, let’s stay in the key of G. Play a standard G chord. As you are (hopefully) aware of, from reading my beginners’ theory columns, any major chord is made up of three notes: the root, the third and the fifth. Our standard G chord has the root on the high E (first) string. There are, of course, two other ways to form the G chord. More than two, actually, but let’s again stick to the basics. One of these G chords will have the third on the high E string and the other will have the fifth. These are (usually) formed with barre chords:

Listening to the recording, I hear the intro as consisting of a G chord alternating with a Gsus4/sus2. To me, the easiest way to highlight the dynamic of this chord change is to use a D shaped chord, which means playing in D with a capo on the fifth fret:

Since this works in mimicking the higher-toned guitar (very well, I might add), I decide to play this song with my capo on the fifth fret, where the D chord is now a G. If you want to play along with your CD then you will want to put your capo on the seventh fret. This will put you in the key of A. All the chords I use will work for you. No pun intended, but for the record, all the MP3s of this lesson are in G (capo on the fifth fret).

Okay, enough of the nit-picking. Let’s play!

Here are the chords we’re going to use in this arrangement:

And here is the chord transcription:

You can see that there’s really nothing hard here. So why make it a lesson at all? What I’d like to do with this song is to show you how to come up with a strumming pattern and maybe take some of the mystique out of this eternal question.

Let’s think about Tangled as a complete picture. The song itself is in 4/4, which means that there are four beats to the measure. In the introduction, as we noted earlier, the chords alternate between D and Dsus4sus2 and each chord lasts two beats. During the first part of the verses, this two-beat pattern continues until the end of the second and fourth lines, where the G chord gets a full four beats. The two-beat pattern then asserts itself for the remainder of the verse until just before the final line (the “tangled up in blue” line), where the A is held for four beats.

In the final line of each verse (the “hook” where the song’s title is sung), we have a measure of two beats, one of C and one of G, before going back into the same chord progression as the introduction.

Listening to the whole song, I get the feeling of it moving steadily along. Until you get to the final line of any verse, things hold very steady. So I want keep things moving. This is the strumming pattern I decided upon. In these MP3 examples, I use the chords of the introduction as a demonstration. First we’ll do it at tempo. In the second MP3 sample, we’ll try it a little slower. I’ll even count it out for you:

(Example 4 at temo)

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(Example 4 slower)

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This is the strum that I will use pretty much throughout the song. I’ve written out the strokes (U = up and D = down). Work on this in the slower tempo until you’re comfortable with it and then slowly bring it up to speed. You’ll find that once the parttern is in your hands and head, you’ll be running on automatic pilot.

This rhythm is a little tricky in that it involves what we could call a “reverse anticipation.” Except for the very first beat of measure one, the chord changes occur a sixteenth note after the third beat and a sixteenth note after the first beat of the subsequent measure.

This brings up two things to note in the second bar (since Alan seems to prefer “bar” to “measure”): First, I use a hammer-on to switch from the Dsus4sus2 to the D. This is so simple! You play the Dsus4sus2 and then just hammer-on your fingers to form a regular D chord. This is a great rhythm trick to use. Second, I will occasionally hit the open D string (the note in parenthesis) as an additional downstroke. This happens because my hand is constantly moving up and down and it helps me to keep the beat.

Now, when I say that “this is the strum I will use pretty much throughout the song,” the key words are “pretty much.” As you listen to the other MP3s, you will find slight differences in the pattern. This is, normally, how most people play. It is rare for someone to keep the same pattern going throughout a song, like a sampling machine. Don’t fret about it. The main thing is to keep the rhythm steady and the chord changes in their proper place.

Let’s move on to the first four lines of the verse:

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You should notice I snuck in another chord on you! I throw a Gsus4 in right before the third beat of G. This is also on the upstroke, by the way. You may wonder why I play the Gsus4 as a partial chord, using only the first four strings instead of all six. Or why I’m throwing this chord in at all, for that matter. Since I’m hitting this on an upstroke, I’m not going to hit all six strings. Your upstrokes, by and large, should not come all the way up. You want to merely punch up the treble part of the guitar while allowing the bass notes to keep ringing from the previous downstroke. And if you are wondering if that explanation, as well as the earlier bit about constant hand motion, is simply a teaser for the long awaited “Absolute Beginners part 2″ piece, give yourself a gold star!

The reason for throwing in the Gsus4 in the first place is to create the illusion of a chord change. Since the chords in the rest of the verse are two beats long, having a four beat chord can slow things down a bit. So a little slight of hand, in this case a quick flip to the sus4 chord, and presto! Our four beat measure of G sounds more like our measure of D and C in terms of chord changes.

We’re going to do the same sort of thing with the final measure of A at the tail end of the verse (the sixth line). But since this point of the song also serves as the final pause before the punch line, as it were, I’m going to use a combination of A, Asus4 and Asus2 to draw things out while still moving them along. Here’s what the last three lines look like:

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This sequence of A chords is also easily accomplished. Starting with your regular A, add your pinky to the third fret of the B string. This gives you the Asus4. To play the Asus2, simply remove any finger from the B string, allowing it to be played open.

Just for the record, I’d like to explain my use of a Bm7 instead of a Bm, which most TABs (or transpositions of TABs) would contain. It’s not really all that mysterious. First, it’s a lot quicker, for me anyway, to switch from an A to a Bm7. If you are one of those people who practically barre the A chord, then A fully-barred Bm will do just as well. The other thing I like about using this chord is that, opposed to an open position Bm (xx0432 or xx4432), I get the B note in the bass.

On the last part of the verse pay particular attention to clipping the C and G chords on the final line before returning to the D / Dsus4sus2 chord progression, which serves as an interlude between the verses.

And that, fellow guitarists, pretty much wraps it up. I hope you’ve had fun playing Tangled Up in Blue and also looking a little into the thoughts behind strumming. When it comes down to it, there is no singular “right” way to play something. If you come up with a pattern that fits what you want to do with a song, go with it. You can have a lot of fun when you get a couple of guitars playing compatible, yet different, strumming patterns for the same song. That’s usually what you hear when you’re listening to a recording.

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next lesson…

Peace

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Silent Night is a classic three-chord song, using the first, fourth and fifth of whatever key you decide to play it in. I like to throw in the relative minor seventh at the end of the next to last line as well. Most people sing it in C major. For the solo guitarist, I would recommend playing in the key of G, which I’ve written out for you here:

There are three essential things to playing in solo fingerstyle – melody, bass and “accompaniment.” You want the melody of the song to ring out, if for no other reason than letting people know what the song is! The bass and accompaniment, usually chord arpeggios, should enhance your presentation – adding color and texture.

This is truly a no-frills arrangement. The bass line, with one exception, will be fairly static and the accompanying arpeggios come straight from your chords. I wanted to come up with something simple and elegant, easy enough for most beginners to try but not so dull that an intermediate guitarist would yawn. I hope you like it. Let’s look at the whole thing and then take it apart:

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The first line of the song consists of two measures which are then repeated. In measure one, start by fretting a G6 chord (320030). Upon reaching the second measure, remove your finger from the B string to let it play open. Here is the picking pattern I use:

The important thing here is to let the melody ring out. Since the melody is on the first two strings, the use of G6 allows you to let the first three notes of the song flow over each other as well as over the accompanying arpeggios. Hitting the bass note with a bit of authority will ensure it sustains throughout the measure. Be sure to play the rest of the chord with a light touch. Think of yourself as a piano or a harp.

Line two starts out with a D chord played up the neck followed by a normal open position D. Those of you who suffered through the lesson, Love The One You’re With, will remember this particular voicing, I’m sure:

Because I don’t have as much of the guitar to work with here (since I’m only playing the top four strings), I hit the bass note (open D string) on the first and third beats, which accentuates the melody notes. In measure six, I switch quickly to our regular D chord. The melody in this section is all on the first string. If you prefer, you can also use a D7 (example 2) as your chord in measure six. Those of you who are truly adventurous might try the third arrangement, where we go from the D to the Dmaj7 to the D7 (and yes, this is just like we did in the lesson, Fire).

We switch back to a G chord in the last half of line two (“…all is bright…”):

Since we’re on the G again, I’d like to point out something – in the pattern I’ve chosen to use on this song, I am not striking the A string when playing the G chord. So why should I worry about getting a finger on that string? That’s one less thing to be moving around and I, for one, appreciate having the extra time to get my fingers in place.

It’s especially helpful when we get to measure eight. Does anyone recognize this pattern from Blackbird or Scarborough Fair? Check out the Blackbird lesson for the lowdown on how to play this.

Measures nine through twelve make up the third line of the song. Here we form a C chord for the first measure:

At the start of measure ten we add our pinky to voice the G note (3rd fret, 1st string) and then slide it down to the 2nd fret to get the F# before removing it all together for the open E (1st) string. Yes, at the end of this measure, you don’t have to fret a single string of the guitar!

Measure eleven you should recognize as being the same as measure one, while measure twelve is, essentially, a repeat of measure eight. The only difference is that in measure twelve you start with the open B string.

The fourth line of the song (“…holy infant so tender and mild…”) consists of a repeat of measures nine through eleven, finished off with an arpeggio of the normal G chord. Again, I’d like to point out that since the melody in the open B string and we’re not playing the A string, you can feel free to fret this as a “partial chord” with only the G note on the third fret of the low E (6th) string.

Okay, now it’s time for the big finish!

Measure seventeen marks the return of our D chord from measure five. I heartily recommend that you play this with your index finger on the fifth fret of the E, your ring finger on the seventh fret of the B and your middle finger on the seventh fret of the G string. You’ll understand why when you see that the melody jumps from the A note (5th fret, 1st string) to the C at the 8th fret at the start of the next measure. Most people have to do this with their pinky and if the little finger’s not free, then you have to go through all the hassle of changing your whole chord. Trust me, it’s not worth it.

I’d also like to recommend using your ring finger of the melody’s G note (3rd fret, 1st string) in measure nineteen. What we’re going to do is to start out with our G chord (remember you don’t have to fret the A!), then on the third beat we will change the bass note from G to F# (2nd fret, 6th string). Now comes the tricky part! On the last half of the third beat, we will hit the open G (3rd) string while sliding our ring finger up to seventh fret of the E string. When we hit it, on the first beat of measure twenty, we will also hit the open low E (6th) string and play an arpeggio on the open D, G and B strings. Believe it or not, this is an Em7.

I like to slow down the last four measures slightly to make the notes more deliberate. Measure twenty-one (the last “…sleep in heavenly peace.”) is a G chord again, but we hit a different note on each beat. I punctuate these notes with the open D string on the second and third beats, alternating with the open G string as a pedal point on the offbeat.

For the twenty-second measure, form a D7 chord (you can leave the high E (1st) string open if you’d like) and add your pinky on the third fret of the B string. This way when you take it off, you’ve automatically got the C note in the melody. Pull that finger off and there’s your B note.

Wrap it all up with a nice slow arpeggio of a full G chord (yes, you can finally play the A string now!) and you’re done. I like to add the harmonics of the G chord (12th fret on the D, G and D strings) as a finishing touch.

Again, I realize that this lesson was a little more “condensed” than the ones you’ve become used to here at Guitar Noise. You have my apologies for that. But I think that most of you should be able to handle this arrangement with little to no trouble.

On behalf of everyone on our staff, I’d like to thank all of our readers for their incredible support of our site. We wish you all a wonderful holiday season and I look forward to sharing an exciting new year with each of you.

Peace

Today we’re going to work a little on the bass end of things, but more in a rhythmic way than a riff (as we did in Hey Hey My My). We’ll also have some fun with dynamics. The song we’ll use to demonstrate these lessons is Fire, written by Bruce Springsteen. If I recall correctly, Bruce originally wrote this for rockabilly singer Robert Gordon. A lot of you may be familiar with the version that the Pointer Sisters had a hit with. A select few may also be enamored of Robin Williams’ interpretation of Elmer Fudd singing the song.

Our version, of course, is for the single guitar, so it will certainly be different from any you’ve heard, but it will also be a lot of fun. At least, it will be after we’ve gotten this out of the way:

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

We’ll be playing Fire in the key of G major. Our arrangement has eight chords, six of which we’ve used before:

The musical hook of this song is in both the rhythm and the repeating bassline. First, let’s get the rhythm into your head:

It’s pretty simple, right? All you have to do is take off the finger you use to fret the sixth string and then place it back on again. This rhythmic riff, if you will, is the glue that holds Fire together.

When you’ve got the rhythm down, it’s time to add the chords. I prefer to use open position chords. Yes, you can also use power chords to play this. In fact, you’ll see power chords used in a lot of TAB transcriptions of this song. But the open chords will sustain a lot longer, creating the effect of more than one instrument being played. Let’s try it and see:

Here we’re striking the G chord on the first beat and then finishing off the two-measure rhythm pattern on the sixth string while the chord continues to ring out. So, when you’re playing the rhythm part, don’t let go of the rest of the chord! It may be a very simple concept, but you’ll be surprised how long it takes some players to get comfortable doing this!

Since close to 80% of Fire consists of this chord/rhythm pattern (although with different chords, as we’ll soon see), this is a good time to do a little experimenting. “Experimenting?” you ask. Yes, even though there seems to be nothing to this, think of all the things you can try. Do you play the chord on the downstroke? Is it a fast downstroke or do you grandly sweep through the strings? Why not try an upstroke?

Where are you playing the stroke? Here’s yet another way to experiment with your guitar’s sound. If you’re using a pick, try strumming the chord in various places. Normally, you’d probably play directly over the sound hole. Take a strum closer to the bridge or closer to the neck. For this song, I find a downstroke almost on top of the bridge provides a great sound that contrasts nicely with the single bass notes.

You can also experiment with playing the chords throughout or adding a power chord-like tone to the bass by adding a few notes, like this:

Other things you might try (as shown in the last examples) are palm muting the bass notes or using very sharp, staccato notes. Palm muting is done by resting the palm of your picking hand very lightly against the strings while striking the notes. Ryan Spencer has written a good article on this technique that you can read here (Palm Muting). To get a staccato note, you want to cut the note off almost immediately after it sounds. The easiest way to do this is just to touch the string again immediately after striking it. You see that there are lots of ways to get adventurous by trying different combinations of any of these ideas.

Again, all this is just part of experimenting. As I’ve told you in many other lessons, there is no one way of playing things. Enjoy yourself and see what kind of sounds you get. Be sure to note what you like and dislike.

Once you feel that you’ve got a sound you like, move on to the next chord. It’s even easier!

Here we’re playing a standard Am chord and using the open A and E strings as our bass notes in our rhythmic riff. These two chords make up three quarters of the verses.

Near the end of each verse, the chords shift from Am to Em:

I especially like using a long downstroke on this chord. One thing to watch for is your fingering. I would normally play an Em with my ring finger on the second fret of the D string and my middle finger on the second fret of the A. But here, I want to be able to get the third fret of the low E string and I can’t always count on my pinky to do that. So I make certain to play this Em chord with my middle finger on the D string and my index finger on the A, freeing my ring finger to fret the low E. It’s all in the planning!

An appropriate thing to discuss here is volume. This statement may take some of you by surprise, but the guitar can be an incredibly subtle instrument. When playing the verse up to this point, I tend to play it very quietly, the bass notes just loud enough to be heard. But when we get to the next to the last line of the verse, I bring up the volume. It’s all straight, even eighth notes and I play them all as downstrokes to have a good control of the volume I bring up:

After the full measure of C, I strum the D chord even harder, but I stop at the third beat and then slap my hand over the strings on the fourth