Playing Beatles Music on Acoustic Guitar

It’s no secret that we, just like you, love the Beatles at RhythmStrummer.com. In fact, they have been my main musical inspiration since the mid 90’s when I started really educating myself in pop music history.

There are a few Beatles tunes that were originally done mostly by acoustic guitar, like Yesterday, Julia, Mother Nature’s Son, and Dear Prudence. And, man, those are awesome classic guitar riffs! But they aren’t super easy unless you’ve been playing for quite a while.

What has worked better for me in my early years of playing is to start with old Beatles 4-piece stuff. Tunes like I Should Have Known Better, No Reply, Love Me Do have pretty easy chord progressions and everyone knows them well enough to sing along.

Simple songs like these give your brain more space to keep everything else together. After all, playing an instrument (especially while singing) is a lot like juggling. You have to be coordinated and managing a lot of synchronous activities at once. If you play simpler songs, you can still have a great musical experience, but without all the mental responsibility.

So pick a Beatles song you like that was written before 1965 and look up the chords. Then, get out the recording and try to match the chords up so you can at least strum one time with each chord change. Don’t worry about the rhythm yet- just figure out how you are going to finger each chord and practice moving from one chord to the next smoothly (a HUGE part of developing good technique!).

Once you can strum one of each chord at the moment that it happens in the song (still while listening to the recording), start strumming a chord on every major beat- like maybe just downstrokes to keep your right hand moving in time.

Here’s where a LOT of repetition and mental focus can pay off. If you just keep your right hand moving evenly, and you are changing chords at the right time, you are playing the basic skeleton of the song. It’ll sound cool if you play it with the recording, but it’ll sound empty and boring if you play it like this on your own- more complex rhythm will need to be added.

I wouldn’t add it yet though unless doing this is really easy for you. If you can’t play through the whole tune with just one downstroke per beat, then encourage yourself to keep at it until it’s smooth, even if you only do it 5 minutes a day.

I’ll write another post in the next few days continuing the conversation from here. Happy Strumming!

Tags: acoustic guitar lessons, beginning strumming, easy guitar songs

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 4:26 am and is filed under Learning Acoustic Guitar Songs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.