"Hey Joe" is a song written by W Roberts, but known through Jimi Hendrix. It is on the Jimi Hendrix Experience Album "Are you experienced". Just as an extra snippet of info, if you are taking your guitar seriously and progress, especially into blues or rock playing, then it is essential that you get a hold of some Jimi Hendrix recordings. His guitar playing is unbelievable and is such a great source of influence that you can’t not listen to it !

Firstly you should not be daunted by the thought of trying to play this song, as we are going to stick to the basic chords which will allow you to play it without all the other Jimi Hendrix stuff. Once you progress, you may wish to add in or learn some of the cool bits which you’ll find on other web sites. This song has a fairly simple layout as it repeats one chord sequence all the way through. The lesson wont be very detailed as we’ll just look at the basics so that you have another song in your armory for practicing and impressing the birds !. We’ll come back to it at a later date so we can add in some fancy stuff, but only after you’ve progressed a bit first.

The song has a few chords which will help to improve your chord changing. It also introduces a few new ones from those learned in Knocking on heavens door.

I’ll not bother to show how the words fit along with the song as I’ll assume you have access to a copy and can figure it out for yourself. Take note that there is a guitar introduction which Jimi plays first, don’t worry about that just now. If your playing along with the record, just start after that bits is finished and then join in. At a later date, as some homework, you can try and figure out how to play the introduction yourself. Try to learn it from listening to the record, only look at the tablature for it, once you’ve tried. Its not too difficult.

Heres the chords you’ll need:

The timing is as follows:

As before, start with downstrums only for each count, starting out slowly at first and then building up the speed as your chord changes get better.

If you have a problem with chord changing, try the chord exercise for a few minutes which will always help.

From here, its quite simple to go straight to a rhythm pattern that fits well with this song, by adding in an up strum between each and every count.

This song lends itself well to experimentation. You’ll find that there are numerous rhythms and picking patterns you can try, that will allow you to play along with the record.

So as usual, play around with different rhythms and note picking to see what you can come up with.

For reference the song is in the key of G Major.

This song has a fairly simple layout and hence lends itself to being an excellent tune to learn for beginners, and is also a great song into the bargain ! The lesson wont be as detailed as that for knocking on heavens door because you can simply try the same things out with this song that were suggested in that lesson.

To make things a bit more interesting, we’ll look at playing the song in two different keys. Each will introduce a new chord to the vocabulary, while one key is harder to play than the other.

If you have a copy of the song you will notice that one chord progression is repeated throughout the whole of the song, so there is not too much to remember when you play it ! The only part that differs from this is just before the start of the first solo section, where the last chord in the sequence is held before the solo for an extra  two bars (count of 8), this happens twice in the song.

The first key we will learn the song in, is G Major, for this you’ll need these chords:

In this key the chord sequence is as follows:

The only new chord here from knocking on heavens door is Em, which is very easy to play and you should not have a problem with picking it up.

As before, start with downstrums only for each count, starting out slowly at first and then building up the speed as your chord changes get better.

From here, its quite simple to go straight to a rhythm pattern that fits well with this song, by adding in a few up strums. Try the following, where a chord in brackets denotes that it is to be played as an up stroke.

Well that’s about it. The only other part is the solo. During the first solo section the strumming changes a little (gets wilder), but the timing is the same. In this key, it is the D chord that is held for an extra two bars.

So as usual, play around with different rhythms and note picking to see what you can come up with.

The second key to try it in is C major, which is the key that is used on the recorded version, heres the chords:

If you can handle the chords, try playing along with the record, it should be easy enough and will sound good as long as your guitar is in tune ! In this key the chords are as follows:

So you can see that this has the dreaded F major chord in it. If this is the first time you’ve tried to play F, its going to be very hard. It took me a few months to get the hang of it !!! Now its up to you whether you go for a partial or full bar F major. It might be sensible to try a partial bar F major at first. Personally I use a partial bar when playing this, but in the end you’ll learn both versions anyway, if you want to take things further.

If you find this a bit difficult, you can always leave it for the moment and come back to it later, but the sooner you master F major, the better. Its sort of the first big milestone you reach in guitar playing and if you can master it, your well on your way to learning alot more.

Its a good idea to try the chord exercises when learning F major. Spend a few minutes in particular on trying this chord each time you practice, because its hard enough that you’ll need to. It seems nearly impossible when you first try, but you’ll get it in the end and practice is the only way.

This song was written by C Stevens, and the version here is from the Best of Rod Stewart Album.

This lesson will add another song to your list with a few basic chord tricks thrown in to help relieve the boredom of normal strumming and give you something to play around with.

Here are the chords you’ll need:

You only need to know two chord progressions for this song, so its fairly easy, these are:

Intro

Verse

Apart from those two parts the only other thing of note is that the G chord in the Intro part is sustained at the end of some parts for a count of four longer.

The layout of the song is as follows:

You should know the drill by now, try each part slowly at first working up your speed as you get better. Try different types of strumming and picking to see what suits you best.

So lets spice it up a bit with a few tricks. These are just general chord embellishments that can be used with the chords in other songs as well.

The first, in this case, is applicable to the F chord in the intro riff. It is best to try the embellishment on its own, before incorporating it into the song. You need to play an F major with a  partial bar, not a full bar, to do this. Hold an F chord on the neck, and try the following:

• strum once down
• lift the middle finger, which should have been holding the second fret of the G string, play an up strum
• put the finger back and strum once more down.

(use this partial bar F Major for the chord embellishment).

The second embellishment that can be added is on the G chord. For this you need to be fretting the chord with the middle, ring and pinkie fingers and hence have your index finger free. On the same riff, for the G chord part, we will this time add an extra C note (1st fret on B string) to the chord using the index finger.

• down strum
• pick the low E string
• down strum
• pick low E string
• put on extra note, down strum
• take extra note off, pick low E string
• and one final down strum.

The riff has been broken down, because that’s the way you should learn it, by breaking the movement down into its component parts and then reconstructing it slowly to form the required riff.

For further practice, both of these embellishments can be incorporated into the learning to fly chord sequence. The F part can be played exactly like it is in "the first cut is the deepest" and the G would be played the same way as the F, downward strum, add note, upward strum, remove note, downward strum.

This happens to be one of the first songs I learnt myself and I have found it to be a good starting place when teaching people to play the guitar from scratch. It contains quite a few possibilities for use, there are many examples of it existing to learn from, and it lends itself well to practise exercises for beginners.

Firstly, make sure you have got your guitar roughly in tuneIt doesn’t have to be exact, but experience will make this easier for you.

Knocking on heavens door was originally written by Bob Dylan and has been covered by many artists (Eric Clapton, Guns n Roses, etc) so quite a few different versions of it exist. The version that is shown here may not fit exactly with any of them, but you can change it to play along with the others.

Here are the chords you’ll need:

I normally use the following layout:

Its as simple as that, you just keep repeating that over and over and you’ve got the song !!!!

To start with try a single downwards strum for each beat, taking it fairly slowly at first, dont worry about speed, as a little practise will get you going alot quicker.

I’m assuming you can work out how the chords fit along with the words (I think I’ll be infringing on the copyright if I print them here). Listen closely to the song and you should be able to hear where the chord changes occur, relative to the words.

Once that has been mastered (or gets boring !) you can insert an upwards strum. To do this we need to change the way we count throughout the beats and bars. Firstly, we will add an upward strum after every second downward strum. We alter the count to:

Count as you see above (1,2 and,3,4,and), add in the upward strum on the “and”.

Once you’ve got the hang of this, change it to an upstroke after each downstroke (1,and,2,and,3,and,4,and).

Notice that in the case above, although the amount of strums being playing has increased, the speed and length of the chord changes are the same. The relevant strums are just made quicker.

Now pick the bass note (biggest string) of each chord before strumming the chord. You should get a pattern that sounds like:

G bass note, G chord downstrum,G chord upstrum, G bass note, G chord downstrum,G chord upstrum, D bass note, etc.. 

In the next case no strums will be used, we shall just pick the strings. For each beat in a bar, we will pick two notes. Example, for the 4 beats of G in the first bar, pick the first four notes of the G chord from the bass down, twice. Repeat this throughout the sequence. For the Am and C chords pick four sets of the four notes from the bass downward.

This song hardly needs an introduction as it is a Beatles classic.  It can be found on the album of the same name.  If you are ever going to play guitar at a party, its usually taken as a given that you have to play a Beatles song, and everyone can join in singing with this one.

The recorded version is based around the piano, but don’t let that worry you, as its quite easy to strum on the guitar.  Its worth noting that all songs are written around a sequence of chords.  Writing music on a piano lends itself access to using chords quite differently.  You can combine notes from different octaves, use variations very easily, play the bass part at the same time and link it in with the chords and you can also use more than six notes, which makes things a little different from guitar.  At the end of the day, you can still reduce a song to its component chords and then transfer it easily to guitar.  Which is exactly what we will do here.

There are three sequences to learn.  A sequence each for the verse and chorus and extra one that is used as a fill in a few areas.

Verse Sequence

The verse sequence is as follows:

In this song, the melody/tune is dependent on little runs that link chords in a few places.  As can be seen in the table above, a G and F have been indicated in brackets.  These will be played as notes only.  To make things easy, rather than using the full bar F major, you’d be better using a partial bar F major chord, then the notes are easily played.  We will play the two notes as follows:

• G note - open G string
• F note - D string fretted at the 3rd fret with the 4th finger.

The chord being played before the run is the partial bar F major.  To get the G note, merely remove the 2nd finger and play the open G string.  For the F note, the 4th finger is already on a G note at the 3rd fret on the D string.  So the work is already done for us !  After playing the two notes, give one strum of C.  Notice that the F & G notes are not exactly over the 2nd & 3rd beats of the 4th bar, but somewhere around the 2nd and 3rd beats (which isn’t so easy to represent in writing).

To keep it simple,  I’ve put the chords at 2 down strums each, apart from the final F and C chords which are one down strum each (as part of the homework, you can play around with the rhythm and spice it up a little).  As always, start out slow and build it up until you get to the right speed.

Chorus Sequence

The verse sequence is as follows:

The chorus sequence is a little different in that it really consists of 4 and a half bars.  The first two notes are sort of played in a half bar (count of two) of their own.  The two notes should be played as follows:

• C note - 3rd fret, A string - 3rd finger
• B note - 2nd fret, A string - 4th finger

Before playing this run, your fingers will be at a C chord position, and you will find these note positions lead naturally from the C chord position (thats called making life easy for yourself, its a good tool that I use frequently).

Fill Sequence

In this song, there is a short fill sequence that is used in a few places, details as follows:

2 bars followed by one strum of C major.

Play the following notes:

• B note - 2nd fret, A string, 2nd finger
• A note - A string open

Putting the song together

Ok, you’ve learned all three sequences, all you have to do now is to stitch them altogether to produce the full song.  The following table gives you all the details you need:

So learn all the component parts separately and then practice slowly at joining them together and eventually you’ll build up to having the whole song under your belt.

Homework

• The rhythm given in the examples is very basic, play around and come up with something different (and more lively).
• Try this song with picking, as it sounds quite nice.
• Try using similar note runs to link chords in different songs.  Simply play around with notes to find ones that sound good.  Always trust your ear - if it sounds good, it is good.

For reference purposes, the song is in the key of  C Major.

The structure given will be presented in the key of A (I’m not sure of the correct blues term for this key, but most people will call it the blues in A).

All five examples used in this lesson have been put into one big zip, download from the following link:

To play the blues in A, we have the following twelve bar structure which just repeats over:

Simple fingerings will be used for each chord (I dont know the particular names of these chords):

When playing the A chords for instance, as indicated in the chord boxes, only two strings are strummed (A & D). The first finger always stays on the second fret of the D string and the only movement is when the third finger is put down on the fourth fret of the D string to produce the second A chord.

Its quite simple. For each bar, there is 4 beats, within one bar we wish to play 6 strums, which consists of 2 strums of the first chord of A followed by 1 strum of the second chord of A, which will be repeated twice.

Notice that there is more emphasis on the first strum and that there is a slightly longer delay between the first and second strums in comparison to all the others. When we put four bars of A together this becomes clear and you can hear that it adds more to the rhythm.

Now we need to learn the D and E parts so that we can put the full 12 bars together. Well luckily thats easy. The fingering and rhythm is exactly the same, except that we use different two strings for the other chords.

So what to do is, slowly practise each part individually and then try and assemble each of the parts together until you get it sounding like example five. Now this may take a little practise, but it’ll be worth it. Its a little tricky, but this ones like ridding a bike, you’ll not forget it once you’ve got it.

So what happens once you get to the end of the 12 bars ?, you go back to the start of course, try it and see.

Now you have the basic structure and rhythm used for many blues songs, easy wasn’t it !

We will keep this lesson short as its important that you get this down before proceeding.

This requires knowledge of the major scale. To start with, we will keep it simple by using C major which has seven notes, with no sharps or flats. That is C D E F G A B being the seven notes. N.B. the Major scale will be discussed in more detail in a future lesson.

In music, certain standard chord progressions exist that crop up frequently but in different keys. Its is convenient to relate such chord progressions to the major scale itself rather than a particular key. The following table will help:

A degree is a note within a scale which is numbered in order to indicate its relationship to other notes in the scale. The first degree of C major is C, the second note is D etc. 

The relevance of this can be seen in the degree column. You may have seen chord progressions before written with roman numerals, eg. I IV V which is typical for a blues progression. 

The names are included for one simple reason, being that I usually find that you only hear these names when someone is trying to impress you about their knowledge of music. For instance they are referred to, all the time in the "Guitar Player" magazine which just isn’t written with a down to earth approach. I wouldn’t worry about memorizing these, just have a look and if you hear them being used you can always come back and see what they mean. E.g. if someone says the subdominant of C major, you know they mean F, etc.

So what does this have to do with chord progressions. Well lets take the I IV V (typical blues progression) for instance, looking at the table above, we can see this gives us C F G, and in fact if you play a 12 bar blues progression in the key of C, these are the chord roots you will need. Referring to the table below, if you wanted to play in the key of A you would need A D and E.