What’s up everyone? This is Mike Deiure from Rock Guitar Power and we are going to look at how to play Dani California by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Okay, so here is our intro riff—our intro chord progression rather and this is also the same as the verse. So our basic core progression is going to use an A minor bar chord, a G major bar chord, a D minor bar chord, and an A minor bar chord again.
So now, our rhythm that we’re going to do actually on each chord is that we’re going to play the root of the chord twice and then strum the whole chord. So if I do it on A minor, once again, now we go to G major then D minor and A minor. Alright, so the whole rhythm sounds like this.
[Demonstration]
Okay, cool! That’s actually our main intro chord progression which is also the same chord progression for the verse. Now we’re going to look at the chorus chord progression and for this, we’re going to switch to a distortion tone and we’re going to use power chords. So I’m going to simplify this just a little bit and we’re going to use all steady eighth notes throughout the whole thing, so our right hand is just going to be moving with down strokes nice and steady.
And the four chords we’re going to use are F5 or an F power chord, C5, D5 and G5. So to start off, we’re going to play F5 four times and then I’m going to go to C5, then we’re going to go to D5 and we’re going to play this six times. So this is going to go [Demonstration] and then we’re going to play G5 for the last two eighth notes. So the whole chord progression looks and sounds like this.
[Demonstration]
Okay, cool! So for the first chorus, we’re going to do that two bar loop three times. On the forth time, the first bar is the same, so we’re going to play F5 and C5. And then to end the chorus, we’re going to play two bars on the D5, so that will look like this.
[Demonstration]
So again, I simplified the rhythm just a little bit just to get you playing this as quick as you can. So that is our main chorus chord progression.
Now we’ve learned all the parts that make up the song. Then it’s just a matter of looking at the tab and listening to the song and learning how many times to repeat each section. So usually, you either have your tab in front of you. You listen to the song and just keep understanding how the structure is. What I’d like to do is actually make a little chi-chi that’s just the basic outline of each section and in what order. So I got the intro, the verse, the chorus, the intro again, and it tells how many times I repeat. So I’ll usually do this just as a quick note to look at the song. Also as another note for the solo, the solo—
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